Our Word Travel comes from Trepalium, a Roman Torture Device

Our English word travel descends from travail in Old French whose first French meaning was le travail d'enfant 'the pain of child-birth,' so we're not talking about some trifling inconvenient discomfort.

The first meaning of travailler in Old French was to suffer real torture. The first English meaning of travail was painful corporeal toil or oppressive suffering. The word travel in its earliest English semantic outing also meant toil and trouble, even the travails and difficult labours of childbirth.

In Medieval French travailler implied odious and literally painful forms of transporting oneself. From these uncomfortable meanings evolved the modern English meanings of travel, which don't begin to appear in Britain until the onset of the fifteenth century. In French and Spanish, the derivatives came to signify hard work: le travail and el trabajo.

From 1080 CE we have record of travailler's ancestor, a vulgar Latin verb tripaliare 'to be tortured with a tripalium or trepalium, a device with 'three stakes' as the Latin name implies: Latin tres, tris, tri 'three' + Latin palus 'wooden or metal stake.' It probably involved impalement of the human body in some gruesome torture beloved of the Romans. The instrument of torture arose from trepalium's first Latin meaning, a farmyard and blacksmith's contraption with three stakes used to immobilize horses and oxen while putting on or changing horseshoes. If you have ever seen a drama depicting gladiatorial practice, you may have seen a junior gladiator swinging his gladius or short sword at a wooden dummy driven into the sand of the arena. This too was named palus by the Romans.

The Pale of Etymology

Latin palus gives several English terms. A well-known phrase in Irish history is 'beyond the pale.' A pale is a stick with a pointed end meant to be driven into the ground, a stake, a boundary peg, a fence stake.

Fans of old western movies will remember early forts built by pioneers conquering the American West. Such forts were almost always surrounded by a palisade, a high fence of medium-thick local tree trunks sharpened at one end and driven into prairie ground, the word ultimately from old Spanish paliçada 'fence made of pounded stakes,' through a Middle French form like palissade from French for 'stake' palis, Spanish pal.

"What You Say, Nigel, is Really Quite Beyond the Pale, Old Chap."

To repeat a stale joke, "Beyond the pale is not where you go when you have kicked the bucket." Something beyond the pale was anything outside of civil rule, anything beyond the agreed (staked) boundaries of custom and propriety, any opinion or territory in which a traveler might find himself at the mercy of letterless yahoos or thuggish do-badders.

Two historical references contributed to the frequent use of the phrase in English. The earliest has to do with Irish history. By the fourteenth century there was a part of Ireland under English control. This "Pale of Dublin" was fenced, with a once guarded boundary. According to the English interlopers, inside the British-controlled Irish Pale of Dublin, culture and human dignity reigned, but beyond the pale the most uncouth depths of Celtic boorishness and beastliness abounded. Inside the pale or palisade, superintending behaviour by the might of armed soldiers was possible, but, beyond the pale, why — a Dhiaa! — a gentleman might be forced to eat a potato or permit an untoward affront by a leprechaun.

A locus classicus of the phrase in English prose occurs in Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers (1837 CE) when Mr. Pott says to Mr. Slurk: "I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct."

Pale of Settlement

The next most famous protected area of jurisdiction using the phrase was the Pale of Settlement in Russia in 1791 CE, created by Catherine the Great, who, true to her German origin, positively glowed in the dark with poisonous anti-Semitism. Catherine gave this name to the western border region of Russia, the one area where Jews were allowed to live ghettoized in impoverished shtetlach (Yiddish 'little towns').

Catherine the Not-So-Great wanted to restrict trade between Jews and native Russians. It wasn't fair, the empress may have thought, Jews can add and subtract and they're civilized — unlike the barbarous Slavic louts and sword- happy Cossacks sent on horseback pogroms to burn Jewish farms and villages and murder every Jew in sight. But some Jews, useful to Catherine and her court, were allowed to live 'beyond the pale of settlement.' The English term was a direct translation of Russian cherta osedlosti 'boundary of settlement.' This prison of specified districts restricted Jewish residence in Russia and Russian-occupied Poland from 1791 CE to 1917.

But now, gentles, I simply must get back to the pet cage, where I am teaching my Rocky Mountain whistling marmot to hiss the opening bars of several Barbra Streisand songs.

Tournure: Rare but Elegant Noun

Tournure (turn-yer) is a word borrowed from French meaning 'graceful deportment,' a noun now obsolescent but one worthy of revival.

Tournure pays semantic attention to beauty of bodily movement, to agile suppleness, to a willow's winsome pliancy, to the nimble ease of choice poise.

Nowadays so scorned a mode is grace that the wedding bride arrives stoop-shouldered and shod in rubber boots. Upon the very table of the nuptial feast yawn too wide bouquets of plastic lilies which accomplish one thing: they obscure from view the people sitting across the table from you. Of course, once one has spoken to those tablemates, the bride's rural cousins clad in what appears to be binder twine and spit, it is possible to be grateful for too wide bouquets. But, oh my, those lily stamens made from pipe cleaners, now that's clever! What a glutinously ornate wedding cake, and with a shelf life of 300 years. Yummy. At head table, directly in front of the microphone, the hunched-up groom blows his nose into a handkerchief and then opens the hanky to inspect discharged mucosities and comment freely upon his own nasal ejecta to revolted fellow symposiasts.

Only in Victorian poetry are we any longer likely — alas! — to encounter upon a magical evening a lissome sylph lithely gliding in fluent tournure down the twilit lawn.

Etymology

The French tournure stems from very late Latin tornatura 'the way a thing is turned or made, its pleasing roundness,' from the more ancient Latin verb tornare 'to round off, to make an object round by turning it on a lathe,' from one of the Roman words for a turner's lathe, tornus, borrowed by the Romans from an ancient Greek word for lathe tornos 'lathe-chisel or compasses: a carpenter's tool used to draw a circle.' Derivatives in modern languages include Dutch and High German turnen, Spanish tornar and Italian tornare. Note that our weather word tornado gets gusty first perhaps as a past participle of the Spanish verb tornar 'to turn, to return, to twist back around.' This etymology seeks the name in the shifting, roiling whirl-a-gig winds of the storm.

One who, in golden days of yore, was adept at merry tournure was Hebe (HEE-bee), Olympian goddess of youth and spring and the spritely vernal delight of dance. Now let us skip off sportively to the next chapter, remembering Milton's lyric adroitness in his 1645 CE poem "L'Allegro" (Italian: 'the happy person'):

    "Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
    Jest, and youthful Jollity,
    Quips and cranks and wanton wiles,
    Nods and becks and wreathed smiles
    Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
    And love to live in dimple sleek;
    Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
    And Laughter holding both his sides.
    Come, and trip it, as you go,
    On the light fantastic toe ..."

Epaulettes, Spatulas & Spades

This chapter's glide down the slide of etymology whisks us from the word epaulette to a spatula to that homey implement, the spade.

How did early anatomical nomenclature arise? What were the sources of ancient Greek and Roman names for parts of the human body that English borrowed and still uses today? Well, ancient body-part names began as the simplest, homiest of metaphors and comparisons.

Here are a few. For example, the few scraps of ordinary Latin speech recorded in ancient Roman texts reveal that the colloquial word for penis used by the common folk of the Eternal City was gladius. Gladius was a name for a short Roman army sword. The root also shows up in English garden vocabulary, where gladiolus 'little short sword' was used to describe the slender sword-like leaves of a familiar garden plant. Where does one put a sword? Into a scabbard or leather sheath. What is the Roman soldiers' word for such a sheath? Vagina!

The sheath protects the sharp blade of a sword when not in military use. Just as the long muscular vaginal tube lined with mucosa evolved during mammalian development to receive the penis and its spermy deposit during copulation, so the leather sheath received the Roman sword or gladius.

Consider the Latin word uterus meaning 'womb' and compare a similar Latin word uter, utris 'big wineskin' or 'water sack made of leather.'

Scapula, our medical word for shoulder blade, in my Casselman etymology, is a diminutive form of Latin scapus 'the stem of a plant, the upright of a door frame, the beam of a steelyard.' A human shoulder blade could easily be supposed to help support the skeletal anatomy of a human. The noun scapus is available with many of its meanings in polysemous Latin having to do with uprights that support things. We also know that the father of anatomical naming, Hippocrates, used the Greek word spathe to name the shoulder blade. In ancient Greek spathe had meanings like 'flat wooden blade of an oar' and 'wide scooping, digging stick.'

Épaulette

This military shoulder patch often dangling with fancy golden braid, in spite of its effeminate array of flaunting flutteriness, is often the strutting pride of macho generals.

The flamboyant shoulder ornament takes its name from a diminutive of the French word for shoulder, épaule. Earlier forms include Middle French espaule from Old French espalle from Late Latin spathula 'little broad sword' from spatha 'short broad-bladed Roman army sword.' The word was borrowed directly from ancient Greek spathe 'flat sword.'

Cognate are the English word spade, the German word Spaten and the Latin spatula, all descendants of Proto-Indo-European *sph-d 'long, flat piece of wood' whence also Hittite ishpatar, 'spear.' In botany the root gives two names of modestly sword-like flower parts: spathe and spadix. The black figure on playing cards, spade, is from a related Italian word for garden tool blackened by immersion in soil: Italian spade, plural of spada 'sword.'

Épaulement 'shouldering' is a stance in ballet where the head is turned to look over a forward shoulder when the other shoulder is drawn back. In the obsolescent vocabulary of fortification, an epaulement is a heap or mound, a shoulder of earth, thrown up to protect soldiers from enemy fire. But let us move forward, for, in the next chapter, strange winds await.

Wind Words like Simoom & Williwaw

An Ancient Greek Wind God

Among Grecian and Roman deities of yore, Aeolus was blustery regent of the winds, superintendent of tempests, justly weather-vain, Caesar of the sirocco, the rex in the storm, monarch of the mistral, whistling conductor of whirlwinds, in short: the pomposity of ventosity (ventus Latin 'wind'). Think of that spritz of urinary sagacity embodied in the Latin proverb: vir prudens non contra ventum mingit 'a wise man does not piss into the wind.'

The Greek Aiolos (or Aeolus in his Roman form) was a mortal king, ruler of the island of Aeolia, a real isle, and, so Homer tells us, one visited by Odysseus and the setting of an episode of the Odyssey (see below). No divine, deifying ichor flowed purple in his human veins and yet Aiolos controlled the winds. His name may be Greek, from their adjective aiolos 'changeable, quick-moving, rapid.' But Aiolos could have been borrowed earlier than classical Greek from a Semitic language like Phoenician, where aol means 'whirlwind.'

Ulysses (Odysseus) Gets Bagged

In the Odyssey Homer tells my favorite story about Aeolos. On his return voyage, Odysseus (Ulysses to the Romans) lolled pleasantly on the Aeolian isle for weeks, bloviating amiably with the wind god. "Hey, Aeolus, flip me a mermaid on the half-shell!" So charmed by his visitor was Aeolus that he gave Odysseus a going-away present: a plump, capacious bag of mighty winds to help blow his ships home to Ithaca. But, once outbound for home, the scurvy crew of sailors and unsavory layabouts on deck accompanying the Greek hero were full of discontent and bloated with nautical bitchiness built up after years at sea, and these ocean scum grew more and more curious to see what perhaps golden or silver treasure lurked in that vast swollen leather bag they had loaded aboard when embarking from Aeolia.

Of course, the crew ripped open the bag; all the stored winds rushed out and blew with force. Odysseus' ships were blown back to the isle of Aeolia by those escaping winds. But, as the sailors clambered bedraggled and besalted up the beach to his palace, the king of the winds showed the revenant miscreants no sympathy. Thus came the gift of Aeolus to naught. Curiosity, like other human traits, must be kept in check.

Simoom

These wind words and names are ones whose ventose sonority appeals to me. Simoom is as slippery a toxic wind as ever sanded a camel's hump. The engulfing simoom withers and desiccates all it passes, hauling sandy dust over most of the Middle East, blowing across the Sahara, gliding over Israel and Palestine, grit-whipping Jordan and Syria and the Allah-loving, woman-hating deserts of Araby. Over dune-strewn wastes both African and Asian, simooms waft and squall in lethal wheeze. Simooms can boil at 54°C (129°F) or parch a throat at 10% humidity. In his 1968 book Climatology, G. R. Rumney wrote: "The sirocco is known as the khamsin in Egypt, leveche in southeastern Spain, where it is usually quite dry, garbi in the Aegean, samoon in Algeria, sahat in Morocco, and ghibli in Libya. There are many foreign versions of the word: samoom, samum, semoom, simúm, samoon, samun, semoun, simoon, and simoun, among others.

Etymology of Simoom

Simoom — the very word summons up Death in a billowy burnoose of ebon velvet, opening skeletal arms to enfold, embosom and suffocate you in its smothering shroud of gasps. Simoom is the poison wind. In Arabic samum 'the poisoner' from the verbal root s-m-m 'to poison.'

Wuthering

One of the best weather adjectives pops up in northern British regional English, namely wuthering. In the best Emily Brontë novel, it inhabits the title: Wuthering Heights. Her definition in Chapter One is tasty too:

"Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling. 'Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun."

Was inclemency ever better limned? The etymology can be explained as a mere vowel gradation of weathering. Withering exists. But the word is thonged with Viking leather too. In Old Norse, proto-Scandinavian language of the Vikings raiders of northern Britain, are stout terms like hvitha 'high wind, squall' to which may be compared a modern Norwegian verb kvidra 'to dart back and forth, to stop and start,' perhaps cognate with Old English words for 'glowing light' or 'aura,' hwitha and hwithu.

Katabatic & Anabatic

Two little technical terms from meteorology are fun to know. Katabatic is said of winds, like Canada's Chinook, that blow down a declivity or hill or Alp, cold air flowing downward by gravity. Cold air of course weighs more than hot air, to which any trip to London, Washington or Ottawa bears witness. Greek katabatos = kata 'down' + batos 'able to go.'

Anabatic wind flows upward like all warmed air. Greek anabatikos = Greek ana 'up' + batos 'able to go.