Month: March 2025

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Linguistics Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

A horse of a different choler

Q: I’ve read that the verb “curry” comes from the Old French correier and that the expression “curry favor” comes from a Middle French allegory about a horse named Fauvel. However, I can’t find correier or anything like it in the original text of the poem.

A: It’s more accurate to say that “curry favor” was inspired by (not “comes from”) the Roman de Fauvel, an anonymous 14th-century satirical poem, believed written by Gervais du Bus, about a horse fawned upon by the powerful in France.

There were several different words in early French that meant to “curry,” or groom, the coat of a horse, including correier and estriller in Old French (spoken from the 8th to 14th centuries), and torchier and estriler in Middle French (14th to 17th).

English borrowed the verb “curry” from correier, while the Roman de Fauvel uses the word torchier in the same sense.

In the satirical poem, the phrase torchier Fauvel (“to curry Fauvel”) is used as a metaphor for flattering and influencing him.

The earliest manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel (1310) is at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (MS Bnf 146). In this example, people from around the world flock to see the horse:

“N’i a nul qui ne s’appareille / De torchier Fauvel doucement” (“There is no one who is not ready to curry Fauvel gently”).

And in this example torchier rhymes with escorchier: “De Fauvel que tant voi torchier / Doucement, sans lui escorchier” (“Of Fauvel, whom so many come to curry, gently, without scratching him”).

The word fauvel in Middle French is an adjective meaning fawn-colored and apparently refers to the horse’s coat, but the author indicates that he’s also using it as an acronym for six sins:

“De Fauvel descent Flaterie, / Qui du monde a la seignorie, / Et puis en descent Avarice, / Qui de torchier Fauvel n’est nice, / Vilanie et Varieté, / Et puis Envie et Lascheté. / Ces siex dames que j’ai nommees / Sont par FAUVEL signifies.”

(“From Fauvel comes Flattery, whose world is the nobility, and then comes Avarice, who is not too squeamish to curry Fauvel, Villainy and Varieté [fickleness], and then Envy and Lascheté [cowardice]. These six ladies that I have named signify FAUVEL.”)

To create the acronym FAUVEL, the author treats the “v” of Vilanie as a “u.” In medieval French and English, the letters “u” and “v” could each denote either the vowel or the consonant, though “v” tended to be used at the beginning of a word (as in vilanie).

The medievalist Arthur Långfors notes in his introduction to the Roman de Fauvel (1914) that the horse’s name is also composed of the Middle French faus and vel (“false” and “veil”).

In addition, the Oxford English Dictionary points out that a similar Old French term, favel, meant idle talk or cajolery, and was derived from the Latin fabella, a diminutive of fabula, or “fable.”

When the verb “curry” first appeared in Middle English in the late 13th century, it meant “to rub down or dress (a horse, ass, etc.) with a comb,” according to the dictionary.

The first OED citation is from The South English Legendary (circa 1290), a Middle English collection of lives of saints and other church figures. In this expanded passage, St. Francis of Assisi refers to his flesh as “Frere Asse” and speaks of it in the third person:

“Of ȝeomere þingue heo is i-fed ȝwane heo alles comez þar-to, / And selde heo is i-coureyd wel” (“On humble food he is fed whenever he comes to it, and seldom is he properly curried”).

When Middle English borrowed “favor” from Old French in the 14th century, the OED says, it referred to “propitious or friendly regard, goodwill, esp. on the part of a superior or a multitude.”

The dictionary’s first example, which we’ve expanded, is from a Psalter and commentary, dated sometime before 1340, by the English hermit and mystic Richard Rolle:

“Thai doe wickidly, to get thaim the fauour and lufredyn of this warld” (“They do wickedly to get themselves the favor and affection of the world”). From Psalm 24:3 in Rolle’s Psalter.

In the late 14th century, the verb “curry” took on the sense of flattering, which the OED defines as “to employ flattery or blandishment, so as to cajole or win favour.”

The earliest citation is from The Testament of Love (1388), by Thomas Usk: “Tho curreiden glosours, tho welcomeden flatterers” (“Those who curried the sycophants, those who welcomed the flatterers”).

Oxford says the verb soon came to mean “to ‘stroke down’ (a person) with flattery or blandishment.” The first citation is from Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede (circa 1394), a medieval poem satirizing friars:

“Whou þey curry kinges & her back claweþ” (“How they curry kings and scratch their backs”). The anonymous satire, written in the style of Piers Ploughman, the 14th-century religious allegory, has been attributed to various writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, author of the original Ploughman.

We assume the flattering sense of “curry” in English was influenced by the Middle French allegory Roman de Fauvel. In fact, “curry favor” was originally “curry favel” when the expression first appeared in Middle English in the 15th century.

The OED defines “curry favel” as “to use insincere flattery, or unworthy compliance with the humour of another, in order to gain personal advantage.”

The first citation, which we’ve expanded and edited, is from De Regimine Principum (On the Government of the Prince, 1411), by the poet and bureaucrat Thomas Hoccleve:

“The man that hath in pees or in werre Dispent with his lorde his bloode, but he hide / The trouthe, and cory favelle, he not the ner is His lordes grace” (“The man who hath in peace or war spilled his blood for his lord, but hides the truth, and curries favel, is not near his lord’s grace”).

The phrase “curry favor” finally appeared in the 16th century. It’s described by the OED as a “corruption of to curry favel” and by Merriam-Webster as an “alteration by folk etymology,” a popular but mistaken account of a word’s origin.

We’ll end with the earliest OED citation for the new form of the expression (spelled “courry fauour” here): “He thoght by this meanes to courry fauour with the worlde” (from a margin note to Matthew 8:20 in the Geneva Bible of 1557).

[Note: If the headline above got your attention, you might be interested in a 2012 post we wrote about the expression “a horse of another color,” an early version of the more common “a horse of a different color.”]

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

A ‘heart-wrenching’ sorrow

Q: I almost never hear anybody say “heartrending” anymore. It appears to have been overthrown by “heart-wrenching,” which, I assume, is a conflation or hybridization with “gut-wrenching.” As is often the case, it seems that the incorrect usage is heard much more frequently than the correct one.

A: You’re right that the use of “heart-wrenching” has increased sharply in recent years, but the usage isn’t new. It’s been around for almost two centuries.

Here are the earliest examples we’ve found:

“The sluices of his tears were opened, and he burst out into sorrow, loud, vehement, and heart-wrenching.” From “The Brothers,” a story in Tales of Ireland (1834), by the Irish writer William Carleton.

“Loosen’d from guilt by a heart-wrenching shock, I hastened home.” From “Arthur: A Dramatic Fable, in Three Acts,” by Thomas Aird, published in July 1835 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.

(The Oxford English Dictionary cites a later printing of Aird’s fable in The Knickerbocker; or, New-York Monthly Magazine, July 1838.)

The term “heart-wrenching” is now recognized as standard by most of the online dictionaries we regularly consult. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines it as “very sad,” and has this example: “a heart-wrenching story.”

Cambridge and Collins include both the adjective “heart-wrenching” and adverb “heart-wrenchingly.” In defining the adjective, Dictionary.com defines “heart-wrenching” with a similar adjective, “heartbreaking.”

As for “heartrending” (sometimes hyphenated), it’s much older than “heart-wrenching,” but not necessarily more correct. And “heartbreaking” is even older and much more popular than either, according to a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks terms in digitized books.

The earliest OED citation for “heartbreaking” is from “The Teares of the Muses,” a work in Complaints (1591), a poetry collection by Edmund Spenser: “Making your musick of hart-breaking mone [moan].”

The dictionary’s first “heartrending” example, which we’ve expanded, is from Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621), a prose romance by the English writer Lady Mary Wroth:

“At last he cry’d out these words: Pardon great Prince this sad interruption in my story, which I am forst to do, heart-rending sorrow making me euer doe so.”

Finally, “heart-wrenching” is not, as you put it, “a conflation or hybridization with ‘gut-wrenching.’ ” The term “gut-wrenching” didn’t appear until the late 20th century, long after “heart-wrenching” was recorded.

The OED’s first citation for “gut-wrenching” is from a book about Grant McConachie, a bush pilot and later CEO of Canadian Pacific Airlines:

“Others had made a perfect landing thirty feet in the air, which was followed by a terrific, gut-wrenching splash as they plopped in” (from Bush Pilot With a Briefcase, 1972, by Ronald A. Keith).

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Word origin

The ambiguity of ‘disambiguity’

Q: I’ve been working on a project where one thing we’re looking at is “disambiguity.” But when I try looking up this word, not many results come back, preferring “unambiguity.” Should I worry about these prefixes?

A: The noun “disambiguity” has been around since at least the mid-20th century, but it hasn’t become common enough to make it into standard dictionaries or even the online Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference with over a half-million entries.

The earliest example we’ve found is from “The Dethronement of Queen Anne,” an article by C. G. Burke about the cult of high fidelity, published in the Saturday Review of Literature (June 24, 1950).

In this passage, Burke describes how a novice audiophile modifies a hi-fi system in a Queen Anne-style cabinet, comparing the before and after versions with the low-key Queen Anne of Great Britain and the assertive Catherine the Great of Russia:

“Queen Anne immediately discoursed with the flamboyant robustious disambiguity of the great Catherine, and our neophyte listened to cosmic intonations in a daze of wonderment for weeks.”

As we’ve said, some English speakers do use “disambiguity” as a noun meaning the removal of ambiguity. But it barely registers when compared with the standard English terms “disambiguation” and “unambiguity” on Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks terms in digitized books.

Although standard dictionaries don’t recognize “disambiguity,” the collaborative dictionary Wiktionary defines it as a “lack of ambiguity” or “disambiguation.”

If you want to use the term and feel your readers will understand it, go ahead.  The editors at the Saturday Review accepted it, apparently assuming their readers would understand.

If enough people use “disambiguity,” it will become standard one day. Ultimately, the users of English are the ones who decide what’s standard. That’s how language evolves.

As for the etymology, all these disambiguating words are derived from the noun “ambiguity,” which ultimately comes from the classical Latin ambiguitas, the ability to be understood in two or more ways.

The earliest English citation for “ambiguity” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an early 14th-century entry in A Middle English Statute-Book (2012), edited by Claire Fennell:

“Ase fram nou forthward, suuch ambiguete sal ben forsmiten ant beo in certein” (“As from now forward, such ambiguity shall be struck down and become certain”).

When the adjective “ambiguous” showed up in the late 15th century, the OED says, it referred to language “having different possible meanings” or “open to more than one interpretation.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from John Skelton’s English translation (circa 1487) of Bibliotheca Historica, a 40-volume history written by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily) in the first century BC:

“He ansuerde vnder this forme derkely intryked with ambiguouse sence” (“He answered in this vaguely intricate way with ambiguous sense”).

The words here with a “dis-” prefix are relative newcomers. The oldest of them, the noun “disambiguation,” appeared in the early 19th century, according to the OED. The prefix here means “in a different direction”—that is, away from ambiguity.

Oxford defines the noun this way: “The removal of ambiguity (esp. in language); clarification; differentiation. Also: the result of this; the action or fact of telling things apart; discrimination; interpretation.”

The first citation is from Outline of a New System of Logic (1827), by George Bentham: “Disambiguation—where it is to fix the sense of an ambiguous term. This operation has been termed distinction by some Logicians.” (Bentham, a nephew of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was a distinguished botanist as well as a pioneer in abstract logical science.)

Readers of the blog may be familiar with Wikipedia‘s “disambiguation” page, which defines the term as “the process of resolving conflicts that arise when a potential article title is ambiguous, most often because it refers to more than one subject covered by Wikipedia.”

The OED says the verb “disambiguate” appeared in the mid-20th century, meaning to “make (something) unambiguous; to render more easily distinguished or differentiated from something else.”

The first example cited is from a paper in the Journal of Philosophy, “What Do You Mean?” by Jerry A. Fodorthe (July 21, 1960): “One disambiguates an utterance by adding to the context of the utterance.”

We’ll end with the OED’s only “unambiguity” citation, which struck us as ambiguous. We’ve disambiguated it by expanding the passage, which comes from a June 24, 1842, entry in Provincial Letters (1844), by the Anglican clergyman George Stanley Faber:

“Its unambiguity is the more fully established, because the language is not that of a single individual but of many individuals who all apparently say the same thing in their own respectively different words.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

Is coconut milk really milk?

Q: For a number of years now there’s been controversy over the term “milk” being used for plant-based products. However, I believe it has been used that way for centuries. Did “milk” originally refer to a process of drawing out fluid, and then to any fluid produced by that method?

A: The notion of plants producing “milk” has indeed been around for centuries, though the animal sense came somewhat earlier. Here’s the story.

If you go back far enough into prehistory, the word “milk” ultimately comes from melg-, an Indo-European root, reconstructed by linguists, that originally meant “to rub” and then became “to milk.”

Etymologists and historical linguists generally believe that the Indo-European base gave rise to meluk-ja-, the prehistoric Germanic root for “giving milk,” which led to the Old English verb melcan and noun meolc.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “the origin of the vowel [u] between l and k in the Germanic base [meluk-ja-] is problematic and has led some to suggest that the noun and the verb may not ultimately be cognate.”

In addition, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots points out “the unexplained fact that no common Indo-European noun for milk can be reconstructed.”

We think it’s probable that both the noun and the verb “milk” do indeed ultimately come from the Proto-Indo-European root. We haven’t seen convincing evidence that contradicts this.

As for the English etymology, the noun appeared before the verb in Old English. It originally referred to the fluid secreted by mammary glands, but that sense soon widened to include the milky liquid from plants.

The OED’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from an Old English translation (circa 900) of Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), an eighth-century Latin church history by the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede:

“He symle in þæm feowertiglecan fæstenne ær Eastrum æne siða in dæge gereorde, 7 elles ne peah nemne medmicel hlafes mid þinre meolc” (“He would always observe the forty-day fast before Easter, eating only once a day, and then only a small amount of bread with thin milk”).

The first OED citation for the milky liquid from plants (in the compound wyrtemeolc, plantmilk) is in an 11th-century Old English translation of Herbarium, a 4th-century Latin herbal, or book about plants and their medicinal uses:

“Wið weartan genim þysse ylcan wyrtemeolc & clufþungan wos, do to þære weartan” (“Against warts, take this same plant’s [spurge’s] milk and clover’s juice, apply to the warts”).

The passage is from an illustrated manuscript (Cotton MS Vitellius C III, f. 29v) at the British Library, which describes it as “an Old English translation of a text which used to be attributed to a 4th-century writer known as Pseudo-Apuleius, now recognised as several different Late Antique authors whose texts were subsequently combined.”

A search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books, indicates that “coconut milk” is now the most popular of the plant-based terms, followed by almond, soy, oat, rice, and cashew milks.

The earliest OED citation for the verb “milk” is from an 11th-century manuscript (Julius MS, 15 September, at the British Library) of the Old English Martyrology, a collection of the lives of saints and other church figures:

“Se geþyrsta mon meolcode ða hinde ond dranc þa meolc” (“The thirsty man milked the hind and drank the milk”).

Finally, here’s an image on the British Library’s website of a page from the Old English herbal mentioned above:

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