Friday words #287

Today’s new-to-me word is kind of silly, but I thought it had some interesting properties. (Alas, one of its properties is not that it’s Hallowe[‘]en themed, sorry.)

The word is lolcano, which basically means an “eruption of laughter.” I got this word from what otherwise seemed like a pretty serious article on the Antigone site about how the Romans’ sense of humor was both the same and different from ours. At one point, the author analyzes a joke and concludes that “While hardly a lolcano, it does satisfy the formula of Incongruity + Pause ––> Clarity.”

You won’t find many dictionary entries for lolcano outside of Urban Dictionary, which has, well, a typical set of definitions (i.e., mostly not good). But in any event, it seems reasonable to presume that lolcano combines the abbreviation LOL (“laugh out loud”) with the -cano part of volcano.

The normal parsing of the word volcano is volcan+o, where the volcan part is from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. But lolcano breaks -cano off from volcano and uses it as a combining particle (morpheme) that suggests “eruption.” This rebracketing is somewhat productive: people have formed other “eruption of”-type words this way, like mudcano (volcano of mud) and watercano (a geyser). In a more metaphoric sense, I found an instance of the word laughcano, which was in reference to a comedy show, and vomitcano to refer to someone spewing nonsense. (Sadly, I have had no luck in finding any instances of wordcano.) There’s also an entry in Urban Dictionary for cano as an adjective, as in someone who “goes cano” with anger. It would be interesting to find other examples, especially metaphoric ones like lolcano.

Of course, lolcano was probably modeled on volcano based on sound; one pronunciation for LOL is like “loll,” meaning that lolcano rhymes with volcano. I don’t know what the track record is for neologisms that are based on rhymes (for example, himpathy), where the new word might be tied too closely to the model. But I have no expertise on this question.

Origins. This week when I looked up the origin of a single word, I ended up pulling on a thread that had a lot of stuff attached to it. It all started when I was listening to episode 56 of the Word Matters podcast, which is hosted by some of the folks at Merriam-Webster. At one point, Peter Sokolowski says “The original mess was mess as in mess hall.”

I thought, huh, what is the mess in mess hall? Turns out we got this from Old French mes, which meant a serving of food or a course in a meal. This came from Latin; they had the word missus, a form of the verb mittere. The Latin verb meant “to put, send, release, cause to go, hurl.”

The “portion of food” sense was extended to refer to a group of people who took meals together. Originally this meant people who were served together from the same dishes, so a small group, but soon enough it referred to any collection of such people. This sense was used particularly in the military because of how companies took their meals together. And from there we got mess hall, which is where people communally take meals.

A specialized sense of mess developed to describe a portion of a soft food like porridge or boiled vegetables: “Give..a word to the dayry maid for a messe of poredge.” (1641) As Emily Brewster points out in the podcast, the original hot mess was just, like, a bowl of oatmeal or something. The “messy” sense of mess seems to have evolved from this. It was used to refer to a mess of animal food, which could be an unappetizing mixture (like pig slop). This led to the sense of mess as anything that’s untidy or dirty (“messy room”), and a further figurative meaning of a troubled state (“my taxes are a mess”). These are comparatively recent senses, going back only to the 19th century.

Another spin-off was mess as “a quantity sufficient to make a dish” or separately “a usually large quantity of something.” You know this in expressions like a mess of fish or a mess of potatoes. Although this appears in Shakespeare, these days it’s only a regionalism in the US, or so says the OED.

Ok. As noted earlier, mess goes back to a Latin word mittere, which has to do with sending or releasing. Dang, there are all sorts of English words that are based on this same root. One is mission, which started with the Jesuits sending brothers out to proselytize. You can probably think of several figurative senses that developed from this original.

Some other sisters and cousins and aunts of mittere and mess:

• admit: to send to, release to enter
• dismiss: to send away
• manumission: emancipating (releasing) an enslaved person
• mass: a church service, originally from the benediction at the end (Ite, messe est: “Go, the dismissal is made”)
• missile: something that is hurled (released)
• permit: to let pass

For fun, you can try putting together as many of descendants of mittere as you can into a single sentence. Here’s one attempt:

He sent a missive about the mess, the premise of which was that he was promising to admit that during the mission they dismissed the message that permitted the missiles.

That’s a mess of words about the messy topic of mess.

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