right

n. Designating the side of the body which is positioned to the east if one is facing north.

n. Pertaining to the political right; conservative.

left

n. Designating the side of the body which is positioned to the west if one is facing north.

n. Pertaining to the political left; liberal.

“Left” and “right” are such common words that we don’t often realize just how significant they are; but like all simple words, they tend to be venerable, storied, and much more interesting than it may first appear.

I was inspired to do these words because of an e-mail forward joking about “left” and “right” politics by quoting Ecclesiastes:

A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.

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codicil

n. An addition or supplement that explains, modifies, or revokes a will or part of one.

Codicil is known mostly as a legal term (for which see the official definition), but in practice is has come to refer figuratively to any addition or addendum, often with a quasi-scholarly connotation. Its use in English dates from the 15th century, when it came into the language from the French codicille and Latin codicillus , which referred to a short writing or small tablet (used for writing). It’s no surprise that the word’s origin is French/Latinate, since most of our legal terms come from that very source. Because French and Latin was, for a long time, the preferred language of the scholars and the judicial system after the Norman Conquest, our common words from that vocabulary Latinate almost to a one.

Codicil is a diminutive form of codex, which was Latin for both “tree trunk” and “book”, and which also gave rise to the more familiar code, initially in the form of a code of law or code of ethics, but which now refers to everything from the cheat code in Contra to the source code that I write at work.

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color

n. The spectral composition of visible light.

n. A particular set of visible spectral compositions, perceived or named as a class[.]

The modern English Color is now the same as the Latin from which it came, though the intervening steps are not: the Latin led to the Old French color, which led to the Anglo-Norman colur, which visited Middle English as colour. The Old Latin root is colos, which referred not to color in general but any sort of covering, which contributed to the earliest sense of the world, which referred to the color of the skin or complexion in particular. The Old Latin comes from the PIE *kel-, meaning to cover or conceal. Our modern definition is from the 14th century, from Middle English, at which point it had replaced the word previously employed, blee.

Blee was a perfectly lovely word, from the Old English blēo, and I’m sorry it left the language. It came from the Proto-Germanic *blījan (“light” or “happy”), itself from PIE *bhlē̆i-, which also meant “light” in color or complexion. Along an evolutionary fork, it gave us the Old English blīþe, from whence “blithe” (as in “blithely”), which meant a light of mood (“glad”) rather than of color.

Of course, as anyone who’s ever looked at a box of crayons can attest, there is a wide variety of color words in use, despite the relatively circumscribed nature of our word for the phenomenon in general.

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ketchup

A tomato-vinegar based sauce.

Ketchup seems as American as apple pie (which itself is English, not American), but just like the pizza we know and love originated in Greece, so the tomato ketchup we use today has a history very different from Heinz 57.

The origins of the word come from a Chinese dialect: 鮭汁, or kê-chiap (“brine of fish”), which was taken into Malay as kicap (pronounced “kichap” but also spelled as kecap and ketjap). Our early Anglicization was catchup (c. 1690), which transmuted into catsup (first used by Jonathan Swift, by all appearances, in 1730), which is the still-used alternative to “ketchup”. Our modern firm first appeared in 1711 in An Account of the Trade in India by Charles Locklear.

Though the lineage here seems straightforward enough, some have advanced the notion that our ketchup is a cognate of the French escavèche (“food in sauce”) but also more importantly the Spanish/Portuguese escabeche, which refers both to a style of food and the brine-like sauce used to marinate it. The word has been traced back to al-sikbaj, of which Karen Hess’ proposed iskebey may be a poor transliteration. Regardless, the etymology refers to a pickled dish: in the former’s case, it comes from the Persian sik (“vinegar”) and ba (“food”).

If you look carefully at a bottle of ketchup, it will likely refer to itself as “tomato ketchup”; this may seem redundant until you realize that a tomato-based version was a fairly recent change in the evolution of the condiment (specifically, the very early 19th century). Though the original may have been fish, its earliest forms were mushroom, walnut, and other things that don’t sound nearly as appetizing (in fact, as late as the early 18th century, tomatoes were considered poisonous).

It has also been suggested that the early origins of ketchup—that is, as kê-chiap—eventually led to the modern condiment known as soy sauce, more popular in inland regions of China. In countries whose cuisine more prominently features seafood, fish sauce is still alive and well: in Vietnam, it is known as nước mắm; in Korea it is aek jeot; &tc. How much it resembles the earliest forms of ketchup, however, is anyone’s guess.

alcohol

n. (organic chemistry, countable) Any of a class of organic compounds (such as ethanol) containing a hydroxyl functional group (-OH).

n. (uncountable) An intoxicating beverage made by the fermentation of sugar or sugar-containing material.

One would generally expect such a popular item to have more interesting—potentially dirty or morbid—roots, but the clinical term by which we refer to that which we imbibe to get silly is nothing more than an organic chemistry term which applies to many different compounds, most of which we don’t (and shouldn’t) drink. The word alcohol itself is unchanged from the Middle English, which absorbed it as a chemical term from the Arabic al-kuħl) (الكحل). It, too, refer to a whole family of compounds, but popular usage tends to refer specifically to ethanol, which is the tasty sort that we drink at bars.

The word ethanol is a combination of the aforementioned alcohol and the prefix ethyl-, which is from the Greek αἰθήρ (“ether”), but very likely our current use of the prefix is more directly from the German äthyl, since Germany was kicking American butts in chemistry before we finally got our act together.

But what about the common man’s terms for alcohol? What about booze, liquor, hootch, and swill? What about all the various kinds of libations: wine, vodka, beer, rum, bourbon, whiskey, scotch, tequila, brandy, and moonshine? Turns out, the world of alcohol is as wide and elaborate as we initially thought.

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