It is still too cold to set out anything in the garden here where I live near Denver.  On cold days, I spent some time in the garden of words, the Oxford English Dictionary. The book A Child’s Garden of Verses reminds me that “garden” is a collection of things even words.  In ancient times especially in the warm Middle East, a garden was a place of pleasure and peace. In the Hebrew Bible there was in Genesis the Gan Eden, a place of beginnings and of peace and delight.  In English, the 16^th century Coverdale Bible has this phrase: “The Lorde God also planted a garden of pleasure in Eden [gardē in text].”

The word “garden” as we use it now primarily for a place for plants and trees comes into Middle English from the Old French jardin which is the same in Modern French. But there was a Germanic word for a garden as an enclosed space which was geard in Old English. In Old Frisian, which was the father tongue of Old English, the word was garda and in Gothic it was gards. Old English geard, an enclosure became our modern yard.  One of my favorite words from Old English is middangeard that is, “middle-earth” which meant simply the earth or the world. It must have been a favorite of Tolkien as well. No one knows why “middle”, but some assume it meant that we all (including Hobbits) live between the heavens and the underworld.

So from biblical times a garden is a place of beauty and pleasure. Henry the Eighth referred to the city of Kent, England as “the Garden of England” apparently for its beautiful scenery.  Shakespeare, in The Taming of the Shrew, refers to Lombardy as “The pleasant garden of great Italy.”  New Jersey calls itself “the Garden State” but I imagine that anyone driving the New Jersey Turnpike wonders why.  Near our home in Colorado is the Garden of the Gods, a remarkable landscape of unworldly rock formations sculpted out of sandstone during eons of geological upheavals and harsh weather. Colorado also has a Shakespeare Garden Festival in Boulder.  The Shakespeare Garden features plants mentioned in the Bard’s plays and poems.  There are dozens of Shakespeare Gardens in the English speaking world as well as books devoted to the delightful references to gardens in the works of Shakespeare.

There seems to be a positive connation to almost any use of the word “garden”.  On the other hand, there is phrase “wicked garden” a most certainly misogynist reference to female sexuality.  The OED does document the slang use of the “garden” as metaphor for the lady parts.  I never knew that, but what teenage boy hasn’t heard of the same as a “bush” and I suppose that is close enough.  With a more obvious meaning, there is also the “lady garden.” The OED notes the first use of “garden” in this way was in a 1640 line written by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Carew in a particularly indecent love poem.  Another poet in 1941, long before he could avail himself of Viagra, wrote “I’ve been sadly let down By the tool of a fool in a garden.”  And then there is the Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. In Bosch fashion, this painting displays a bizarre collection of fantastical creatures, biblical and animal and imaginary. And humans, all naked as jays, seeking pleasure.

The biblical garden at the beginning of all earthly things was supposed to be a literal place of verdant growth, flowers, trees and at least one fruit.  Ever since, the garden has served in all manner of figurative  senses.  An early figurative garden was a 14th century reference to the “gardin of þe herte”.  There is also a garden of the soul and a garden of the mind.  For Shakespeare, our bodies are gardens and our wills are the gardeners.  Plato taught in a garden named for a Greek hero Akademos, and now that garden is in English the “Academy.”  Epicurus also taught in a garden and sometimes Epicuren philosophy is called, simply, “the Garden.”

Sometimes a baseball field is called a garden.  In fact, early baseball might have been played in an apple orchard, and sportswriters who are forever seeking synonyms may refer to a baseball diamond as an apple garden or apple orchard.  Sports arenas and events locations of all kinds are called (capitalized) Gardens and Madison Square Garden is not the only one, London has one too.  Also Michigan and Las Vegas have events locations called a Garden.

To artfully deceive is “leading one up the garden path.”  One of my favorite quotes is the concluding remarks in Voltaire’s Candide: “All that is very well, answered Candid, but let us take care of our garden.”  After all the calamities of the world, it is best to care for the simple things, the living things that are closest to us and closest to the earth itself.  The OED writes that the Candide quote is the source of the phrase “to cultivate one’s one garden” that is, to attend to your own affairs. 

So I will.  In the cold weather I have set up some shelves with grow lamps and started flower and herb seeds called “gardening under lights.”  After the date of the average last frost for Denver, I’ll set out my little ones.  In the garden.

Sister Anne, my eight grade English instructor, was no language reactionary.  She insisted that the word “ain’t” certainly was in the dictionary and was perfectly acceptable in informal settings.  She also allowed the use of “don’t give a tinker’s dam” because she said it is a “dam”, not a “damn.”

Only it isn’t. The fanciful explanation is that the industrious tinkers would mend a hole in a kettle or some such by building a circular dam around the hole to keep in place molten metal for the repair.  It’s a folk etymology, one that I have always liked.  Actually, tinkers must have been a rough bunch and had the reputation for robust swearing, hence “tinker’s damn”.  Of course, the folk version is just more fun.

I suppose there has always been a first class in travel, if for no other reason than desire of the wealthy to distinguish themselves from the riff-raff.  First class travel is more comfortable and just snooty.  However, you might stop believing the nonsense about “posh”.  There were no Port-Out Starboard-Home cabins for the British aristocrats in their travels to colonial India. This is not etymology but it is a nice folk etymology, a fanciful and often interesting fable about word origins.  This folk etymology is particularly absurd.  A steamer on its way from India to England would travel for the most part south then north around Africa.  The hot sun would beat down on both sides of the ship during daylight hours.   No doubt the nicer cabins would cost a great deal more than steerage and a poor guy like Leonard DiCaprio couldn’t travel in comfort.  If the clever nonsense about posh were true there would be ticket stubs and manifests stating such a class. But there are no such tickets or manifests.  The trouble with demonstrating that the posh tale is wrong is that no one knows how “posh” came to be.

Folk etymologies are often clever.  I like the one about “minding your p’s and q’s”.  No, not the flapdoodle about the bar-keep.  Everybody please stop saying pub tenders would tell a half-soused patron to mind your p’s and q’s, that is, keep your own tab of your pints and quarts and tell me what to charge you after you are truly hammered.  Really?  Not even close.  The one I like is that the phrase originated from early printing where the master printer would tell the apprentice to mind his p’s and q’s.  In early, but not too distant times, a printer would set type by hand, letter by letter to form a word and then a page.  The flat of words was inked then pressed onto the paper.  So individual type face letters were mirror-image and p’s and q’s would be hard to distinguish unless you could read and write like Leonardo da Vinci.  Unfortunately, this is an ingenious folk etymology but just not true.  The OED records documents using the phrase, particularly by school teachers, long before movable type came to England in the 15^th century.  Perhaps there was in the beginning a reference to handwriting, but all written records seem to carry the simple meaning of a caution to behave.

A folk etymology that fooled me and probably most everybody is “sophomore” the wise fool.  This is folk etymology linking Gr. sophos  (wise) with moron.  Actually, the word sophomore is derived from a British school term sophister (from sophumer) or “arguer” a somewhat disparaging reference to second year students, that is, that their arguments are sophistry.

And I am sure everybody, and that includes me, thought that the word “female” is some kind of male dominant language term for a gender that is less than “male.” A sort of diminutive male. Or perhaps descended from the word “male” maybe taken from Adam’s rib.  But no.  Female is simply derived from L. femella, a young woman from L. femina, a woman.  As for the word “woman” itself, well maybe that is part of male oriented English.  In Old English wif was simply “woman” (but later a married woman) and then came wifman, the usual OE term for woman.  The latter is a conjoining of wif to man which in OE meant not a male but simply “human”.  So once again it seems the word for woman was a person somewhat derived from a human.  And just as a final note for those who didn’t study Old English in college, the OE word for “man” was wer as in Modern English “werewolf” a really male dominant term.  All men turn into animals at night or day.

The antivaxers and antimaskers are out in force adding to the dangers we all face. I remember reading about the opposition to masking during the 1918 influenza pandemic. There was no flu vaccine at the time so the only tools that public health had to work with were masks, social distancing, and the ancient technique of quarantine (quarantine from Latin quaranta, “forty” the days a ship must wait offshore during medieval pandemics). A recent article in the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-history-of-vaccine-mandates-in-america-11631890699?page=1) has provided some clarity on this rhubarb (baseball-ese for a kerfuffle).

The type of immunization that General Washington required of his troops would have set ablaze the hair of the anti-vax screamers. This technique was variolation (from variola, Latin term for smallpox). Variolation was an ancient Asian technique of placing a piece of flesh from an infected person onto the abraded skin of an uninfected person. Obviously this was a dangerous procedure because it transmitted God-knows-what disease along with a possible case of full-blown smallpox. Variolation came into use in the West in the early part of the 18th century. Back in elementary school we all learned about the remarkable discovery by Edward Jenner who observed that milkmaids often became immune to smallpox by working with cows infected with cowpox. Jenner coined the term vaccination (from Latin vacca a cow) and used it in his 1788 paper on the new technique. This was five years after the Washington’s victory. Jenner’s initial technique was pretty gross. He applied the pus from a cow oozing cowpox to a small boy. I wonder if the boy signed an informed consent release but anyway he was successfully immunized. Using cowpox provided a much safer way of immunization.

The British cow that provided the cowpox was named Blossom. A common name for a favorite American cow is Bessie. A certainly false but cute folk etymology is that a bovine is often named Bessie because Ivy League professors who grazed their cow on campus would call the girls home in the cry “Here Bossie! Come Bossie!” using ancient Latin bos another term for a Roman cow. Or they could have been using Greek bos or bous as the word was the same or similar in classical Greek. An early form of written Greek was done in boustrophedon, or “as the ox turns”. In other words, this script was written and read one line going left and the next going right just like plowing field. The “turning” in boustrophedon is the strophe syllable. In Greek drama, the chorus would take dance steps reflecting the stage action. If events took a terrible turn the chorus would strophe or turn dramatically the other way. That step was called a catastrophe. Like the Covid Pandemic or the 2016 presidential election.

So if you want your shop, or I should say your shoppe, to sound authentically antique, you might call it Ye Olde Shoppe. This is faux Middle English.  A Modern English speaker would pronounce this as “ye old shop” but the e at the end of olde signifies a schwa.  In Middle English, “old” might have been spelled “olde” and was no doubt pronounced with the schwa ending.  Spelling at that time was not standardized at all. In Middle English the ye would have been “the” because, well, that’s what it was.  The “y” was used by early printers to represent the letter ð from Old English which is still used in IPA symbols to represent the voiced “th” as in the before a vowel. In addition, printing was expensive and th is so common that printers may substituted the y for th.  But of course Middle English is just crazywith the schwa endings contributing to a appealing rhythmic sort of lilt just perfect for poetry.  The one line everybody remembers from Chaucer is:

            Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The “Aprille” had three syllables with three stresses.  Low stress-high stress-unstressed.  In Modern English Aprille becomes April and loses the schwa.  Nowadays, the schwa gets short shrift in elementary and secondary school English classes, but actually the schwa is very important in English.  After all, the most common word in English is the definite article the.  Before a consonant, the is pronounced with the schwa IPA /ðə/ with the upside “e” symbol representing an unstressed vowel sound. The schwa can be a reduction from any vowel that is reduced and unstressed sort of a minor throwaway vowel sound that has not the status of a full fledged vowel.  The development of the schwa sound is a process of language change; the schwa is prominent in later periods of Old English but probably was not present in the early days of the Anglo-Saxon period but by Middle English it was common. Chaucer used not only soote but also swete for our modern “sweet”.  In Modern English spelling the “e” ending sometimes lingers as a signal that indicates that the internal vowel is long or a diphthong, a sound change due to the Great Vowel Shift. The standardization of spelling in English was a long time in the making but any printing begins to help make spelling standard.  The Great Vowel Shift really got going after printing was begun in England so we now spell many words the way they were pronounced but the vowels shifted while the spelling remained.  In Middle English the word “name” was no doubt pronounced like Old English “nama” but there was a shift from [a:] to [ei].  The  “e”  ending remains to indicate the diphthong in modern “name”. 

            In fact, I never heard of the schwa until I studied Old English in graduate school.  I wrote my entirely forgettable master’s thesis on the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood where I examined the counting of stressed syllables, an important element in English prosody.  The schwa sound is counted simply as secondary stress and may have been more emphasized than in Modern English.  Now, the schwa sound is not secondary stress but unstressed, short and sort of just thrown away.  Here is a perfect iambic pentameter line in Early Modern English from Marlowe:

            Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships

The Was is secondary stress and this is primary stress and the secondary then primary stress goes on for the pattern of five units.  Even though the face starts with an unstressed syllable it is counted as secondary stress.  The fact that launch’d uses an apostrophe to indicate a missing “e” tells me that Marlowe did not want launched to be pronounce with two syllables as it was formerly.

            To hear a scholar who is in love with the English schwa, a strange enough love but highly entertaining, listen to the podcast Lingthusiasm #44, “Schwa, the most versatile English vowel”.

During the second impeachment trial of former president T***, one of the attorneys described some evidence as having “literally eviscerated” the opposing side. Adriel was literally floored. I had mentioned before that “literally” is a Janus word, one having two opposite meanings. It can mean actually or metaphorically. In either case, it is an intensifier. And it is perfectly okay to use it either way although language scolds wrongly claim it can only mean actually, according to the meaning of the words. Possibly the objection is based on a sort of etymological fallacy, that is, it is a descendant of “literal” therefore it should be used as such, as “according to the word”. I am usually content to use it in either sense and I am usually content with its use metaphorically by any English speaker. After all, there are easily found citations of the word used metaphorically by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, James Joyce and even Adriel. Kory Stamper, who I mentioned earlier, wrote in her wonderful book Word by Word, the Secret Life of Dictionaries that Merriam-Webster does receive letters of complaint on many words in there dictionary. They have a brief defense against the complaints here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-literally .

But “literally eviscerated”? I had the image in my head of one attorney being disemboweled by another lawyer. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not a pleasant picture. There must be some usage rule that cautions against the figurative use of “literally” where it takes hyperbole to hyperbolic heights.

I am not at all a fussy about spoken English. Of course, written English ought to adhere a little more to standard, more precise usage. However, when my old boss Mr. T. would say, dismissively, that’s a “mute point” I just cringed. Yes, he would write it, too. And that’s not the only evidence that Mr. T. was a certifiable asshole, there is a lot more. I’ll save it for later.

I was reminded of Mr. T by another couple of assholes who were the defense lawyers for Donald Trump for his second impeachment trial. One properly used the term moot in his presentation when he said that since the former president (the other even bigger asshole Mr. T.) was already out of office so removal from office was moot. Meaning null, gone, useless. Lawyers also use moot as in “moot court” a practice or pretend court used primarily by students.

In England, the Anglo-Saxons would have a moot to gear up for battle or to celebrate victory or assemble for discussing their affairs. A moot was simply an assembly, a meeting, in Old English, it was gemot. The ge- prefix forms the past participle of mot. Modern English “meeting” and “meet” are related word all going back to PIE *mod- “to meet.” England has today places of assembly called moot-halls like a town assembly hall. However, in Anglo-Saxon times, the hall of assembly was the “mead-hall” like the one ravaged by Grendel. I suppose a meeting of the guys called for a great deal of mead drinking. And not entirely off the point, there was a lot of drinking required at an ancient Greek assembly of the boys, called a symposium. You could look it up. It’s a Greek guy-party, a “drinking-together”.

This belongs to the category of “wow, I never knew”. The word spurious in common usage means false or fake. The word comes from Latin spurius meaning illegitimate as in illegitimate child, a bastard. This was its original use in English, later becoming to refer to anything that is not quite genuine. Like the word genuine itself, there must be an enormous number of words a phrases related to birth. Genuine goes back to the P-IE *gene- root referring to birth. Genuine, gender, gene, generation, genetics, even genius and many others, and in a roundabout way even the word kin. And then there are words born of Latin natus (born). There is native, natural, natal, nativity, even natural and so many others with the same heritage.

In Kentucky, you will often hear of someone feeling puny. Commonly, the word puny means small or insignificant. In colloquial Kentuckian, it means sick, or slightly unwell. Puny also is a birth word. Puny is an anglicized French puisne or puis (after) ne (born) that is, a child born after another child. That is, a lesser child. How this comes to mean not feeling well, is well, I am not sure, although I have used it myself and rather like it.