суббота, 9 сентября 2017 г.

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/08/17 (cranky, emormous)

I had a tweet from Alison Baker, who wondered about the history of somebody being cranky, you know, if you feeling a litle bit irritable or bad-tempered, why are you cranky? So, your average cranky person isn't right-angled, but that is in fact what the word cranky once meant. It goes all the way back to the 11th century, to describe handless or treadles that were bent at a right angle. Usually to be used to turn something, obviously, and we still use crank in that sense. And it actually comes from an Anglo-Saxon word, so an Old English word, meaning to curl oneself up into a ball, especially on a battlefield, if you were hurt. So, the idea again that you were bent double or bent at a right angle on the battlefield. And this idea of somebody being bent out of shape, I suppose, instead of straight, began to be applied to people who were not just weak or sick, but also to a kind of mental state, so you were slightly bent out of shape, or you were just mentally a little bit out of gear, and of course, crochety is an extension of that, if you're not quite with it, you're slightly out of gear, then you are indeed cranky. It goes all the way back to that idea of beign at right angles. And speaking of angles, the word enormous also comes into this equation, because the Latin tern "enormis" is a combination of the prefix e, meaning out, and as a noun, norma, and a norms was a carpenter's square, and eventually, norma, and then "normalis", which of course gave us "normal" today, came into English to mean right-angled, and that's where it stayed, actually, for a very long time. And eventually that idea of "enormis", so sort of outside the carpenter's square, if you like, led to the idea of deviating fron the ordinary rule. So, being unusual in some way, not quite correct in your shape. Like a carpentry project might be "enormis" in that sort of sense, it might just not turn out as you expect. And that unusualness eventually came to be applied to something that was much larger then normal, and of course, that's where enormous comes in, and that's where it's stayed today.  But we still keep that sense of deviance when we talk about enormity of the situation, which strightly speaking is not about the magnitude of a situation, but it's all to do with how much it deviates from the norm, in fact it's sometimes means complete wickedness. 

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