Etymology Quotes

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.”
― Mary Daly

“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.”
― Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

“It's a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct-- "Darling, could you stroke my vagina?"-- you kill the act right there. I'm worried about vaginas, what we call them and don't call them.”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

“Omniscient, omnipotent, omnivorous and omnipresent all begin with Om.”
― Ashwin Sanghi, The Krishna Key

“Although, fanciful's origin circa 1627 made me still love the word, even if I'd ruined its applicability to my connection with Snarl. (I mean DASH!) Like, I could totally see Mrs. Mary Poppencock returning home to her cobblestone hut with the thatched roof in Thamesburyshire, Jolly Olde England, and saying to her husband, "Good sir Bruce, would it not be wonderful to have a roof that doesn't leak when it rains on our green shires, and stuff?" And Sir Bruce Poppencock would have been like, "I say, missus, you're very fanciful with your ideas today." To which Mrs. P. responded, "Why, Master P., you've made up a word! What year is it? I do believe it's circa 1627! Let's carve the year--we think--on a stone so no one forgets. Fanciful! Dear man, you are a genius. I'm so glad my father forced me to marry you and allow you to impregnate me every year.”
― Rachel Cohn & David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“The word should be thinkering.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Do you know where 'policeman' comes from, sir? ... 'Polis' used to mean 'city', said Carrot. That's what policeman means: 'a man for the city'. Not many people knew that. The word 'polite' comes from 'polis', too. It used to mean the proper behaviour from someone living in a city.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Aleister Crowley once stated that the most important grimoire, or book of magical instruction, that anyone could ever conceivably own would be an etymological dictionary, and in my opinion he was exactly right. I keep it right here by my desk, and just 10 minutes ago it confirmed for me that I had the spelling of “proprioception” right all along, even though my spell-checker had raised a crinkly red eyebrow.”
― Alan Moore

“The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.”
― Leo Durocher, Nice Guys Finish Last First edition by Leo durocher (1975) Hardcover

“After the rise and decline of Greek civilisation and the Roman destruction of the city of Carthage, they made one area of the conquered territories into a province which they called Africa, a word derived from "afri" and the name of a group of people about whom little is known. At first the word applied only to the Roman colonies of North Africa. There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called "Ethiopians," for the Greeks referred to Africa as "the Land of the Burnt-face People".”
― John Henrik Clarke

“Auctions are a venerable selling institution, in use since the time of Herodotus. The word comes from the Latin auctus, meaning to increase. An obscure term for auction, one guaranteed to impress friends and neighbors, is the Latin word subhastare. It is the conjunction of sub, meaning "under," and hasta, meaning "spear." After a military victory, a Roman soldier would plant his spear in the ground to mark the location of his spoils. Later, he would put these goods up for sale by auction.
¹The highest bidder was called the emptor, whence the term caveat emptor.”
― Rakesh V. Vohra, Principles of Pricing: An Analytical Approach

“IN THE fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the sestieri of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as a geto. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city’s swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The campo was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews.”
― Daniel Silva

“Vimes had believed all his life that the Watch were called coppers because they carried copper badges, but no, said Carrot, it comes from the old word cappere, to capture.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“The word mortgage originates in French. it literally means 'death grip'.”
― Michael McGirr, The Lost Art of Sleep

“He wonders aloud at the origins of valentining.

'You're right,' Rachel says. 'It is a verb. Can be. And birds valentine each other, make mating calls. And usually mate in mid-February. You see?'

'But why Valentine?' asks Zach. 'Why valentining?'

'There were many Saint Valentines,' offers Tasha. 'I don't know what the link is between their martyrdom and love letters.'

Zach is not very interested in the old tradition or the archaic verb. He is not bothered by the mating calls of passerines or the saints named Valentine and their associated symbols—he is merely fishing. Does Rachel think the tradition silly? If he were to send her a valentine, how strange would that be?”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“The poet doesn’t know what the poem, finally, will be “about” when he uses the word’s etymology as a starting point before he knows the twists and turns of its history. For example, when I decided to write about vanilla as part of a series of poems about food, I researched its etymology, discovering that it comes from the Spanish vainilla, diminutive of the Latin vagina (“sheath”). Thus, the pod-shaped bean was named after the vagina, which itself was named for the function it provides for the penis.”
― Natasha Sajé, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory

“Etymology” is from the Greek and means the study (logia) of the “literal meaning of a word according to its origin” (etymon).... It can be a huge help in spelling. For instance, people sometimes misspell “iridescent.”... Rather than just try to memorize the spelling, if you look at the etymology—study the entrails of the word—you find that “iris, irid” is a combining form that comes from the Greek Iris, the goddess of the rainbow and the messenger of the gods.... [O]nce you know that “iridescent” comes from Iris, you’ll never spell it wrong.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“The Chinese for pay is pei, and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad. The Uzbek for chop is chop, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog. The Mayan for hole is hole and the Korean for many is mani. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well.

Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realize that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We're bound to coincide sometimes.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

“The Oxford English Dictionary itself feebly admits that 'In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means "black, dark," or "pale, colourless, wan, livid".'

...

Utterly illogical though all this may sound, there are two good explanations. Unfortunately, nobody is quite sure which one is true. So I shall give you both.

Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no difference. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn't decide between black and white as to which color burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black.

The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everybody got bored and rode off to sack Rome.

...

The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void, and empty. What do you have if you don't have any colours?

Well, it's hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colors—black and white—are simply different interpretations of what blank means.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

“The English word “free,” for instance, is derived from a German root meaning “friend,” since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Everything is Theory.”
― Wald Wassermann

“When we are disputing about the proper meaning to be attached to a particular word in a sentence, etymology is of little use. Only children run to the dictionary to settle an argument. But if we would consider the nature of meaning, and the relation between thought and things, we cannot profitably dispense with etymology. It is long since men gave up the notion that the variety of natural species and the secrets of their relation to each other can be understood apart from their history; but many thinkers still seek to confine the science of language, as the Linnaeans once confined botany, within a sort of network of timeless abstractions. Method, for them, is another name for classification; but that is a blind alley.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“The Indian regarded the human being as a 'divine mortal', or a 'divine physical being'. Indeed, I have had it explained to me that the prefix "hu" in some tongues meant 'divine', and "man" of course, is mortal. So a human being is a divine mortal being - a dual being existing in the realms of both spirit and matter; one spiritual, the other physical; one eternal, the other temporal.”
― Kenneth Meadows, Earth Medicine: Revealing Hidden Teachings of the Native American Medicine Wheel

“Although power predates the sovereignty of language, the will of the world is defined by speech, its rubric preserved by voicing the visual and the abstract. We were nothing more than label-makers. Etymological parasites. Concepts reduced to single terminology might as well count for a groan, the same brass snore from another room. Comprehension is a code, a cipher swapped out against forms remote or in motion, the remainder relegated fantastically to the opaque and fallacious.”
― Jacob H. Kyle, The Tedium Lies

“I love how words travel through time; across space and time like little comets, their various meanings burning off like tails behind them.”
― Tess Kincaid, Pechewa: An American Odyssey

“The etymology of the word friend comes from the Proto-Germanic word frijand, which means to love. Love and friendship: friendship and love. They come from the same place.”
― Holly Smale, Picture Perfect