Friday words #299

My Mac’s screen saver has a word-of-the-day thing, and the other day it presented the word catenary. I think this caught my eye because I’m apparently attuned to the letters c-a-t. Anyway, I looked it up and learned some interesting stuff.[1]

First, the word catenary describes the shape of a curve that looks like this:

Interesting thing number one is that the curve is named catenary because the curve is suggestive of the shape of a hanging chain. A catenary curve is not a parabolic curve, though it looks like one.

Interesting thing number two is that catena is the Latin word for “chain.” (In Spanish, cadena, as Nancy Friedman reminded me on Twitter.)

A third interesting thing is that the curve has practical applications; if you invert it, you can use it to create arches. There’s one particularly famous arch that’s in the shape of an inverted catenary curve, namely the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri:

Inverted-catenary arches are architecturally useful because they support their own weight. There’s a great picture in Wikipedia of a freestanding catenary arch made from bricks:

Knowing about catenary arches answers a question I’ve always had about how they build domes. It turns out you can make a self-supporting dome by using the principle of the catenary arch, rotating a series of them around a central point.

Anyway, that’s this week’s new-to-me word. It’s hard to imagine that this will come up much, but watch, in a week or two I’ll stumble across some other reference to it.

On to origins! Not long ago, Twitter user John Dantzler asked an interesting question about the word goblet:

(Text: ” Why would anyone drink from a goblet? Whether it’s a little gob or a little gobble, neither sounds appealing.”)

And once he brought it up, I could see how the word goblet could engender word aversion in some folks.

So how did we end up with the word goblet? It’s an old word in English, going back at least to the late 1300s. You will not be astonished to hear that we imported it from French, who had it in the form gobelet to mean a drinking cup. This derived from gobe + el (“relating to”) + et (a diminutive).

What’s fun is that the gobe part is glossed as “a mouthful.” This makes sense; a goblet is for a mouthful of something to drink.

There’s a suggestion that gob might ultimately have come from a Celtic word. Since the French-speaking Normans had taken over the territory of Gaul, it wouldn’t be surprising if they’d picked up at least some words from the Celts who had once ruled Gaul.

This means that the gob of goblet is distantly related to the gob that we have in gobsmacked and shut your gob. Although this second use of gob came into English via a different route (Irish and/or Scottish Gaelic), the gob of both goblet and of gobsmacked seems to point to a Celtic origin.

Then there’s gob to mean “a lot of” as in gobs of money and “a lump” as in a gob of paste. Not to mention gobble, “to eat greedily.” Still the same root, all going back to some sense of a mouthful, in various literal, metaphorical, and sometimes kind of icky senses.

I’m coming around to John Dantzler’s qualms about drinking from a goblet. Yeah, it’s all fancy-looking, but I’m going to have a hard time not thinking “gob” every time I see a goblet.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.

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[1] If a) you are a math person and/or b) you live in St. Louis, you probably know all this. [^]