Suppose that you decide to get a puppy. The puppy comes home on Friday and you spend all weekend romping around with your new companion. But on Monday you realize that you have to go back to work and leave your best friend behind.[1] So sad!
But you might not need to, not if you work for a company that offers … ready? … pawternity leave. Also apparently known as mutternity leave or furternity leave.
As the punny name suggests, pawternity leave is time that your employer grants you so that you can spend time with a new pet. This is part of a larger trend of pet-friendly workplaces (for example, allowing employees to bring dogs to work.)
I just learned the term this week from a tweet, but I got curious how old it might be. I found news articles referring to pawternity leave policies going back to 2016. If there are articles from May, 2016 about such policies, the policies themselves must have been in development since 2015, maybe?
I did a Twitter search on “pawternity leave” and learned that the concept of “pawternity leave,” at least in a joke-y way, has been around for at least 10 years:
It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that the term had been invented multiple times for the same concept—it seems like an obvious enough pun. The surprise, I guess, is that it’s become a real thing, at least in some companies.
For origins today, a question from friend Melanie: what’s with the nip at the end of turnip and parsnip? And possibly other words (vegetables? plants?) ending in -nip.
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that turnip and parsnip are (linguistically) related. It starts with turnip, whose -nip element goes back to the Latin word napus, which means … “turnip.” (The Spanish word for turnip is nabo.) This came into English very early as the word neep or nep or nepe or naep. The word still exists in that form in some dialects, such as Scots English, where a popular dish is neeps & tatties, i.e. turnips and potatoes.
Staring in the 1500s, the word turnip started to appear. It’s not certain what the turn- part was supposed to mean; the usual explanation is that it referred to the turnip’s round shape (as if “turned on a lathe” per Douglas Harper).
In Latin, the word parsnip was pastinaca; the botanical name is Pastinaca sativa. About as far back as we have records in English, though, the word has some version of an -nep ending, something like passenep. It’s not clear why the -aca ending in Latin (-aise in French) become -nip in English, but it seems likely to be “corruption by” or “remodelled after” the word neep for “turnip.” I mean, they’re both whitish root vegetables, right? It would make sense that they should have similar names.
I can also imagine—this is pure speculation, don’t tell anyone this—that having the word parsnepe and nepe for two similar vegetables might, what, encourage further differentiation. Imagine this conversation in a 15th-century English accent:
Hey, greengrocer, do you have any nepes?
Do you mean just nepes or parsnepes?
I mean the round ones … you know, the turn-type nepes.
… and so the word turnip developed. (Again: I just made that up.)
By the way, how did the Latin pastinaca end up in English with an R, as in parsnip? No one knows. The R appears only in English; other languages that borrowed pastinaca didn’t add it (e.g. Pastinake in German).
Ok, one more nip, namely catnip. Although catnip is also a plant, the nip ending is unrelated to the nip in turnip and parsnip. The nip of catnip comes from nepeta, which is the Latin name for the catnip plant. (Possibly, although also possibly not, from Nepete, the name of an Etruscan city.) Another name for catnip is catmint, which underscores that while turnip/parsnip and catnip have similar-looking roots (haha), they are quite different plants. It’s just another example of convergent etymology, where words with different origins evolve into the same form.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] Imagine that this scenario is playing out in the Before Times. [^]