Orlova - Hot for words: answers to all your burning questions about words and their meanings

In the old daysthe very old daysbeing able to go to school meant you had a lot of time on your hands.

THATS BECAUSE THE WORD SCHOOL comes from the Greek word schole, meaning leisure. Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato used to gather groups of young men who werent going to be distracted by mundane activities like working a job; they taught these young men, and called the gatherings scholea name that carried the clear suggestion that these students could afford to spend their time doing something that most other people couldnt.

The name stuck, and later on, the Romans turned the Greek word that had come to mean gathering of students into schola, which in turn gave rise to English words like school, scholastic, and scholar. Nowadays, the idea that only cultured, leisured people should go to school has fallen out of favorone can only wish that school time were still considered leisurely!

When you use the word school in the phrase school of fish, youre using a word with the same spelling, but a different lineage. Thats because the word school in school of fish descends from a Dutch word thats akin to the Old English word scolu, meaning gathering of people.

I am

• A. an etymologist
• B. a philologist
• C. a nicebecetur
• D. all of the above

(Answer: d. A nicebecetur is a fine, dainty, or fashionable woman. Some people will try to tell you that the word is obsolete, but I just used it, which makes this book a published, contemporary citation of modern usage. Draw your own conclusion.)

I confess: I am in love with the English language. And no entry in this book serves as better evidence of the kind of long-running, public love affair I have chosen to pursue than philology a word that proves once and for all that my lifes work really is (in the immortal words of Tina Turner) a love thing.

PHILOLOGY TRACES ITS ANCESTRY through an old Latin word, philologia, that literally means love of learning or love of letters. That Latin word came from two Greek words, philo (meaning love) and logos, (meaning word or speech). To me, philology will always mean the love of words.

Now I want you to visualize a rushing river that is barreling through time and space, from Ancient Greece toward the twenty-first century, carrying you and me along with it. Up ahead, the river is about to split off into three different directions. In modern English, the river we are riding, the river called philology, has divided into different fast-running, complementary streams of meaning. One branch of the river is the study of the relationship of languages, and especially the study of the history of languages as reflected in their texts; a second branch of the river means just the study of old texts to learn more about a people or a culture; and a third branch means just the study of literature. (Yet another branch, meaning the science of language itself, has never really caught on in the United States, and is likely to flow instead into conversations of linguistics, as we shall see in the next entry.)

Which branch of the river will we take? I say we take all threewherever they lead.