By: Bears Butt
At rendezvous this past week I was told a word that I had never heard before. My good friend Dry Dog was enjoying breakfast with Three Guns, Twister and myself. Breakfast consisted of sausage links, bacon, eggs, hash browns and a favorite of mine called “sweet breads”. So as not to get you confused with what sweet breads are, let is suffice to say, they have nothing to do with bread, rolls or any other form of danish.
I explained to the three of them where sweet breads come from off beef cattle, and Mr. Dry Dog asked “Is it a ‘gelatinatious’ material”?
I had to pause and look at him. If you know him, a word of such grandeur does not usually roll off his tongue like it did that morning. It took me back and I had to admit I had never heard that word before. He explained the meaning and if I had thought about the word for a moment I think I could have figured out what it meant.
Without hesitation Twister piped in with “It’s more ‘glandular'”! And we all know what that means, Right?
In my mind sweet breads are closer to “Glandular” than “Gelatinatious” and let’s let it stand as that.
Today, I was pondering the origin of words and decided to look it up on the web. There is a word called “Etymological” (or something like that) that people who study the origins of words are called..I’m an etymological type of dude. I’m really not, but that is my use of the word to let you know how to use it.
While on the web, I came across a site (and there are a ton of them) called “Etymologically Speaking” and there wasn’t an author on the site that I could find. And this person has tried his etymological best to tell us the origin of a lot of words. Keep reading and you will find some that I found to be rather interesting.
From “Etymologically Speaking”:
Broke (In the sense of having no money)
Many banks in post-Renaissance Europe issued small, porcelain “borrower’s tiles” to their creditworthy customers. Like credit cards, these tiles were imprinted with the owner’s name, his credit limit, and the name of the bank. Each time the customer wanted to borrow money, he had to present the tile to the bank teller, who would compare the imprinted credit limit with how much the customer had already borrowed. If the borrower were past the limit, the teller “broke” the tile on the spot
Cheers
From the Greek “Kara” for “face,” via the Latin “Cara,” and Old French “Chiere” for the same. So “Be of good cheer,” means, “Put on a happy face.”
Humor
We borrowed it from latin, meaning liquid. The ancient philosophers believed that four liquids entered into the makeup of our bodies, and that our temperment (temperamentum,”mixture”) was determined by the proportions of these four fluids,or humors, which they listed as blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile. If you had a overplus of blood, the first humor, you were of the optimistic and sanguine temperament (latin sanguis, blood). A generous portion of phlegm, on the other hand made you “phlegmatic”, or slow and unexciteable. Too much yellow bile and you saw the world through a “bilious” eye , and since the word “bile” is chole in Latin, you were apt to be choleric and short tempered. The fourth humor, the non-existent black bile, was a little special invention of the ancient physiologists. A too heavy proportion of this made you “melancholy,” for in latin melancholia meant ” the state of having too much black bile.” Any imbalance of these humors, therefore made a person unwell and perhaps eccentric, and, as the years went by, the word humor took on the meaning of “oddness,” and a humorous man was one that we now call a crank. And finally the word was applied to those who could provoke laughter at the oddities and the incongruities of life. (Wilfred Funk, Word Origins and their romantic stories)
Ketchup
The Chinese invented ke-tsiap–a concoction of pickled fish and spices (but no tomatoes)–in the 1690s. By the early 1700s its popularity had spread to Malaysia, where British explorers first encountered it. By 1740 the sauce–renamed ketchup–was an English staple, and it was becoming popular in the American colonies. Tomato ketchup wasn’t invented until the 1790s, when New England colonists first mixed tomatoes into the sauce. It took so long to add tomatoes to the sauce because, for most of the 18th. Century, people had assumed that they were poisonous, as the tomato is a close relative of the toxic belladonna and nightshade plants.
Third Degree
A “Third Degree,” also known as a “Master Mason,” is the highest rank within the Free Mason (and has been since 1772). To become a Third Degree, you must undergo a series of questions.
A reader adds: Your definition of “Third Degree” is close, but not exact. There are actually 33 degrees within Freemasonry, of which the first 3 are used for initiating a new member.
Once the initiate has completed all 3 ceremonies of initiation they are termed a “Master Mason”, yet they may undertake more study and progress further still with respect to rank and level of degree. However, no further study is required of a Master Mason, and they may remain a third degree Master Mason for as long as they please.
The first degree is termed the “Apprentice” initiation.
The second degree is termed the “Entered Apprentice” initiation.
And the third degree is correctly termed, as you have mentioned, the “Master Mason”.
The reason it is such a well coined phrase lies in the fact that the initiate, whilst enduring the “Third Degree” initiation, undergoes a series of stressful and unpleasant happenings, much more so than the first 2 degrees. I.E. The phrase : “That poor bugger is getting the third degree.”
Threshold
“Threshold” originated in the middle ages when houses with stone floors were covered with threshings to keep the floor warm and to prevent it from being slippery. As threshings were added during the winter, they would be scattered and thinned near the door, so people added a wooden board to hold the threshings in — a threshold. The OED defines threshold originally as, “The piece of timber or stone which lies below the bottom of a door, and has to be crossed in entering a house; the sill of a doorway; hence, the entrance to a house or building.
Trivia
The derivation of the word trivia comes from the Latin for “crossroads”: “tri-” + “via”, which means three streets. This is because in ancient times, at an intersection of three streeets in Rome (or some other Italian place), they would have a type of kiosk where ancillary information was listed. You might be interested in it, you might not, hence they were bits of “trivia.”
Whiskey (Ireland); Whisky (Scotland)
This term originally came from uisge beatha (Scottish Gaelic) and uisce beatha (Irish Gaelic), which both mean “water of life.” The word entered English as “whiskey” or “whisky” when Henry II invaded Ireland.
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