After seeing multiple screen adaptations, I recently started reading the book Emma by Jane Austen. Austen’s books are old enough that their language is slightly exotic in a fun way (“Mr. Elton is shewing your picture to his mother,” “A sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty“), but not so unfamiliar, like Shakespeare, that you need glosses for many terms.
Mr. Woodhouse, Emma’s father, is much concerned about his health, or per the new word I learned this week, he’s a valetudinarian. The OED defines this as “A person in weak health, esp. one who is constantly concerned with his own ailments; an invalid.” Mr. Woodhouse not only worries about his own health, he likes to advise others about theirs, as he does to a guest at dinner: “I do not advise the custard. Mrs. Goddard, what say you to half a glass of wine? A small half-glass, put into a tumbler of water?”
Valetudinarian, or valetudinary in its adjective form, seems to have come directly from Latin. There are cognates in French and Spanish, but from what I can tell, it wasn’t filtered through those languages before we got it in the 1500s. It wouldn’t be surprising if a quasi-medical term was taken from Latin in the late middle ages, would it?
In Latin, valetudo described a state of health (“usually bad unless deliberately expressed otherwise”). The word valetudenarius came to mean “sickly, weak, infirm,” and that’s how we imported it.
That was a fun find. I’m now looking forward to learning some more new words as I read on.
Ok, origins. We watched a documentary about Egyptian archeology the other day, and it made me wonder where we got the word mummy from. It turns out that the word took a couple of twists.
The ultimate origin is a Persian word mum, which meant wax. This engendered the word mumiyai, which refers to “a bituminous substance” or something like what we put on road surfaces. The substance was used among other things for embalming. The word was borrowed into Arabic as the word mumiyah to refer to an embalmed body. We (all of Europe, really) got the word in medieval times from Arabic.
The word mummy thus had two senses—a substance that was used for medicinal purposes and for embalming, and the embalmed bodies themselves. Or actually two and a half senses: it also developed a sense of a substance that was extracted from mummified bodies. The OED explains this last (and now thankfully “historical”) sense:
Belief in the medicinal powers of the bituminous liquid which could be extracted from the bodies of ancient Egyptian mummies apparently arose because of its resemblance to pissasphalt. Later, similar powers were ascribed to mummified flesh itself, which was often used in the form of a powder.
The word mummy to refer to the bituminous substance lasted well into the 1700s. The sense of a powder made from mummified corpses appears as late as 1886.
Our more familiar sense of the preserved body is attested from the 1600s, along with the verb to mummify. I was amused to see that the OED has a separate entry for “An embalmed corpse which has been brought back to life (occurring esp. as a stock character in horror films),” which they date from 1933 in reference to the film The Mummy. From Persian wax to Boris Karloff—the word mummy has certainly been—heh-heh—well preserved.
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