How Some Words Are Related

The words we use have long histories. Some are straightforward, but many have interesting stories behind them. I have seen many lists of interesting etymologies, but I have very few lists containing pairs of words that are related in some way. The following pairs have some interesting stories about how they are related.


Cybernetic and Governor

The words “cybernetic” and “governor” come from the same word. That puts Arnold Schwarzenegger in a whole new light, doesn’t it? Cybernetic, while popularly known in the context of biotechnology, is to do with the science of regulatory systems. This can mean the way computer programs control robotics, or how social groups are arranged into hierarchies. The word “cybernetics” comes straight from the Greek word “kubernetes”, in English. The Greek “K” (kappa) is generally turned into a “C” in English, and the Greek “U” (upsilon) becomes a “Y” in English (cyclops is a perfect example). In Greek, a kubernetes was the pilot of a ship, the person who controlled how the ship moved.

The Greeks were better sailors than the Romans, so it did not take long for the Romans to use Greek terminology on Roman ships. The Romans, however, favored the “G” sound over the “K” sound, and “kubernetes” became gubernator. From there, the word started to mean “the guy in charge.” Centuries passed, and the Latin-speaking Franks, who lived in one particular region of Gaul, imposed their pronunciation of Latin on the region, which they now called “France” or “land of the Franks.” Just as the Romans preferred the “G” sound to the “K,” the French preferred the “V” sound to “B”, in this particular word, giving us “governor.” The French “governor” passed into English after the Norman invasion (more on that later).


Dexterity and Sinister

Unlike the two previous words, dexterity and sinister do not come from the same word, but were, in fact, opposites. Dextera in Latin means “right hand”, and Sinistra in Latin means “left hand.” Both words acquired their modern connotations in antiquity. The right hand was the hand that held a soldier’s weapon. “Right-handed” became slang for being skillful or agile, giving dexterity its modern meaning millenia before it was reduced to another stat on an Orcish archer’s ability score.

Sinister’s modern meaning comes from fortune-telling. Augurs (not to be confused with auger, a word discussed a little later) were Roman priests who specialized in divining the will of the gods by watching the flight of birds. The number, direction, origin and species of birds seen, all had some meaning to the augur. Birds seen in the augur’s right field of vision were auspicious, or favorable, while birds seen off the left shoulder were unfavorable, thus “sinister” acquired the meaning of harmful or evil.


Shirt and Skirt

The Anglo-Saxons who invaded and settled Great Britain spoke a dialect of West Germanic, the largest of the three branches of Germanic languages. In the 11th century, Vikings from Denmark invaded and settled throughout what would become modern England, eventually controlling half of the region. These Danes spoke a dialect of North Germanic. The two languages were very similar, but had a number of important differences in pronunciation. Words that had a sh pronunciation in Old English were given a sk pronunciation in Danish.

Both cultures wore a long, unisex frock. In Old English it was called a scyrte (pronounced shoor-teh), while in Danish it was called a skyrta (skoor-ta). As the two cultures mixed, Danish words found their way into the English vocabulary. The nearly identical words for the same object began to be used alongside each other. One came to mean the top half of a man’s outfit; the other came to refer to the bottom half of a woman’s outfit. The same thing happened to many other words, such as screech and shriek.


Gringo and Greek

The Greeks have never called themselves “Greek.” They have always referred to themselves as “Hellenes”, after the mythological figure Hellen (not to be confused with Helen of Troy). The word “Greek” comes from the Latin term “Graeci,” which means “the people from Graia,” the first Greek town the Romans encountered. Gringo, a derogatory word for non-Spanish speakers that is used in many Spanish-speaking areas, likely comes from Griego, the Spanish rendering of Graeci. The word was originally a casual way of saying “foreigner” in Spanish, not unlike the English expression “it’s Greek to me.” After the Spanish expansion into the Americas, the word began to take on a more derogatory context.


Galaxy and Lettuce

The word for milk in Greek was galax (or galactos, depending on whether it was the subject of a sentence or not), while the word in Latin was lac (or lactis, again, depending on whether it was the subject of a sentence). Both Greek and Latin developed from proto-Indo-European, and the two words come from the same source. The Greek term, however, had an extra syllable.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is named after its milky-white appearance in the sky. The word galaxy developed out of the Greek galaxias, with the word galax as its root. The actual term “Milky Way” is a translation of the Latin “via lactea.” Lettuce comes from the Latin word for lettuce, “lactuca.” The word developed from lac (lactis) because the juice of the plant has a milky white appearance. Speakers of Old French pronounced “lactuca” as “laitue.” The English term, developed from the plural “laitues,” was eventually spelled “lettuce.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

I send you some thoughts (some personal and some attributed) for Thanksgiving Day, my sincere thanks for visiting this blog and my hope that in giving thanks even more will become open and visible to you.

The other day a friend asked me if I liked Kipling. I told her that I had never kipled before and that I would get back to her. I know what I need to do over the holiday!

It is literally true, as the thankless say, that they have nothing to be thankful for. He who sits by the fire, thankless for the fire, is just as if he had no fire. Nothing is possessed save in appreciation, of which thankfulness is the indispensable ingredient. But a thankful heart hath a continual feast. W.J. Cameron

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. The half-time of a football game takes twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

Now, as someone (I honestly forgot who) once said, - "Enjoy eating your ritually beheaded corpse with 3rd degree burns over 100% of its body." Maybe it was Agent Mulder from "The X Files"?

Have a wonderful holiday!

Failure To Communicate

From The Boston Globe

The inability of many students to write clear, cogent sentences has costly implications for the digital age

By Kara Miller
May 19, 2010

WHEN YOU teach English to college students, you quickly realize two things.

First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts, where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson, where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students.

The second thing English teachers realize is that correcting students’ papers is tremendously time consuming. I constantly do battle with myself to spend less than 20 minutes on a paper. At meetings, instructors are often urged not to exceed 15 minutes, but I frequently end up spending double that. This can be a genuinely frustrating experience: 50 papers stacked on the coffee table, 10 in the finished pile, and an entire afternoon gone.

But I can’t help it; there’s so much to correct. Subjects don’t agree with verbs. “Its’’ and “it’s’’ are used interchangeably. “They are’’ is confused with “their.’’ And facts too often function as topic sentences. Many of the students whose work I correct are smart, motivated, and quick to incorporate suggestions. But they have either forgotten the rules of writing, or they never learned them in the first place.

Some of the problem, of course, is carelessness. But much of it is not. I have read seniors’ cover letters — letters that aim to snag them a dream job — and they’re frequently riddled with both grammatical and stylistic mistakes.

Inadequate writing skills have led to concern in colleges across the country. In 2007, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that just 24 percent of 12th-graders scored “proficient’’ or better. That same year, more than 80 percent of students at the City University of New York had to enroll in remedial courses in reading, writing, or math.

Vartan Gregorian, the former president of Brown University, has expressed deep concern about the erosion of solid communication skills. “In an age overwhelmed by information (we are told, for example, that all available information doubles every two to three years), we should view this as a crisis, because the ability to read, comprehend, and write — in other words, to organize information into knowledge — can be viewed as tantamount to a survival skill.’’

Which leads to a serious question: why do so many students come to college without a command of fundamentals?

To some degree, it’s a mathematical problem. If it takes me all weekend to correct 40 papers, how can a high school English teacher begin to tackle 120 papers (four sections, 30 students per section) in a detail-oriented way?

The few teachers who do spend day and night reviewing papers deserve both a medal and a hefty raise. As they know, fixing students’ writing is complex; it simply cannot be boiled down to a multiple-choice test or a series of right-and-wrong answers. Which may mean rethinking the way writing is taught in high school — and, perhaps, the way teachers are compensated.

We often belittle English teachers — if you speak and read English, how hard can it be to teach it? — but those with strong communication skills are both rare and valuable. Recall that when Massachusetts implemented a teachers’ test 12 years ago, the public was shocked to discover that more than 30 percent of prospective teachers failed the literacy portion.

Though the media tend to focus on nationwide shortages of math and science teachers — which are indeed acute — finding, coaching, and retaining good English teachers is an underreported struggle. Indeed, as anyone who has received a poorly written e-mail, assessment, memo, cover letter, or report knows, writing — both good and bad — has real power. The National Commission on Writing (a part of the College Board) has calculated that “remedying deficiencies in writing costs American corporations as much as $3.1 billion annually.’’

In an increasingly digital world, writing acts as a vehicle for knowledge — giving it short shrift in the classroom is a serious mistake.

Kara Miller teaches at Babson College.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

National Novel Writing Month

Before our regular post, here is an interesting piece of news -

Sarah Palin coins ‘word of the year’

The guardians of usage at the New Oxford American Dictionary awarded the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin the distinction of coining 2010's "word of the year" — "refudiate" — via her Twitter account.

According to TLC, roughly 4.96 million people tuned in to watch the first episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska." That's the biggest premiere in the channel's history.

And as if the ratings triumph weren't enough, today the New Oxford American Dictionary declared "refudiate" the top word in 2010 — a verb that Palin apparently invented.

The former governor used the word in a Twitter message last summer, calling on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" a planned mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. When critics pounced on the made-up verb, Palin deleted the Tweet and replaced it with one that called on Muslims to "refute" the site — even though that usage made no sense, either, since to refute is to prove something to be untrue.

But in a release on November 15, the New Oxford American Dictionary defended Palin's use of the word. "From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used 'refudiate,' we have concluded that neither 'refute' nor 'repudiate' seems consistently precise, and that 'refudiate' more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of 'reject,' " the New Oxford American Dictionary said in a press release.

And lest you think the New Oxford editors were only hailing "refudiate" as a publicity stunt, let the record show that Palin's coinage was also named to the honor roll of the Global Language Monitor project — together with terms such as "spillcam" and "vuvuzela."

*****

And here is the post for today -

It’s National Novel Writing Month!

National Novel Writing Month

Some people criticize the concept, claiming that novels written in under a month aren’t going to be worth the paper they’re printed on. But there are plenty of examples to prove the naysayers wrong. In fact, many classic, bestselling novels were penned within this time frame. While these authors completed these fine pieces of literature without the motivation of National Novel Writing Month, they still serve as an excellent example to those hoping to complete their own works this November.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas: Irish novelist John Boyne said he was so wrapped up in this engrossing tale of a boy living through the Holocaust that he wrote the entire thing in two and a half days, barely stopping to eat or sleep throughout the ordeal. He notes that his other novels took months of planning and effort to write, but this story simply could not be slowed.

On The Road: The so-called “beatnik bible” that inspired an entire generation was penned in only three weeks. Granted, Jack Kerouac spent seven years travelling across America and taking detailed notes the entire time, but the actual fruits of his labor took less than a month to put on paper. It’s worth noting that he typed the entire draft on one 120 foot long piece of teletype paper that he taped together before writing.

A Study In Scarlet: The novel that introduced the famed detective work of Sherlock Holmes to the masses took Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle three weeks to write in 1886. This story was also notable for being the first Sherlock Holmes story to be adapted to the silver screen.

The Tortoise and the Hare: In 1954, Elizabeth Jenkins wrote this tale in three weeks after being romantically entwined with a man who refused to leave his wife. She revealed in an interview in 2005, “I have never looked at it since; it marked an era to which I had no desire to return.”

The Gambler: Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote this tale in 26 days while also writing Crime and Punishment. He was heavily in debt and addicted to gambling and saw the semi-autobiographical novella as a good way to help him pay off his debts. He later ended up marrying the young stenographer to whom he dictated the story.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark took only one month to write this novel about a fictionalized version of her teacher, Christiana Kay. She said the story was inspired by a 1960 class assignment: “We were given to write about how we spent our summer holidays, but I wrote about how [my teacher] spent her summer holidays instead. It seemed more fascinating.”

If you’re participating in National Novel Writing Month, good luck! We hope these stories helped inspire you to get cracking.

Interesting Article From Erin McKean

Redefining Definition


By ERIN McKEAN
Published: December 17, 2009

If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition. “According to Webster’s,” begins a piece, blithely, and the lexicographer shudders, because she knows that a dictionary is about to be invoked as an incontrovertible authority. Although we may profess to believe, as the linguist Dwight Bolinger once put it, that dictionaries “do not exist to define but to help people grasp meanings,” we don’t often act on that belief. Typically we treat a definition as the final arbiter of meaning, a scientific pronouncement of a word’s essence.

But the traditional dictionary definition, although it bears all the trappings of authority, is in fact a highly stylized, overly compressed and often tentative stab at capturing the consensus on what a particular word “means.” A good dictionary derives its reputation from careful analysis of examples of words in use, in the form of sentences, also called citations. The lexicographer looks at as many citations for each word as she can find (or, more likely, can review in the time allotted) and then creates what is, in effect, a dense abstract, collapsing into a few general statements all the ways in which the word behaves. A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.

Despite all the thought and hard work that go into them, definitions, surprisingly, turn out to be ill suited for many of the tasks they have been set to — including their ostensible purpose of telling you the meaning of a word. Overly abstract definitions are often helpful only if you come to them already primed by context. It’s difficult to read a definition like “(esp. of a change or distinction) so delicate or precise as to be difficult to analyze or describe,” and have subtle immediately spring to mind; or to come across “reduce the force, effect or value of” and think of attenuate.

Definitions are especially unhelpful to children. There’s an oft-cited 1987 study in which fifth graders were given dictionary definitions and asked to write their own sentences using the words defined. The results were discouraging. One child, given the word erode, wrote, “Our family erodes a lot,” because the definition given was “eat out, eat away.”

Neither are definitions complete pictures of all the possible meanings of a word. One study found that in a set of arbitrarily chosen passages from modern fiction, an average of 13 percent of the nouns, verbs and adjectives were used in senses not found in a large desk dictionary. And of course there are some words that simply elude definition, a problem even Samuel Johnson faced. In the preface to his groundbreaking Dictionary of the English Language, he wrote, “Ideas of the same race, though not exactly alike, are sometimes so little different that no words can express the dissimilitude, though the mind easily perceives it when they are exhibited together.” We all have had Johnson’s experience of “easily perceiving” differences between words that we cannot as easily describe — quick: what’s the difference between louche and raffish? Most people, when asked what a word means, resort to using it in a sentence, because that’s the way we learn words best: by encountering them in their natural context.

Given these shortcomings of definitions, and the advantages of examples, why do we still cling to definitions? The short answer, for hundreds of years, has been a practical one: space — specifically the lack thereof. Print dictionaries have never had sufficient page-room to show enough real, live, useful examples to create an optimal and natural word-learning experience. Even the expert lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary, which famously includes “illustrative quotations” alongside its definitions, still put the definition and its needs first, making new words wait their turn to make it through the definition bottleneck.

The near-infinite space of the Web gives us a chance to change all this. Imagine if lexicographers were to create online resources that give, in addition to definitions, many living examples of word use, drawn not just from literature and newspapers but from real-time sources of language like Web sites, blogs and social networks. We could build people’s confidence in their ability to understand and use words naturally, from the variety of contexts in which words occur. Indeed, this is what my colleagues and I are trying to accomplish at the online dictionary Wordnik.com: we’re using text-mining techniques and the unlimited space of the Internet to show as many real examples of word use as we can, as fast as we can.

This approach is especially useful for grasping new words and uses: if you look up tweet on a site like mine, for example, you understand that the word is used to refer to messages sent via Twitter; there’s no waiting for an editor to write you a definition; plus there are examples of tweets right on the page. Online, you can also look up just the form of a word you’re interested in — say, sniped instead of snipe — and find precise examples. A word is so much more than its meaning: it’s also who uses it, when it was used, what words appear alongside it and what kinds of texts it appears in.

Without privileging definitions, dictionary-making would involve more curation and less abridgment, less false precision and more organic understanding. If we stop pretending definitions are science, we can enjoy them as a kind of literature — think of them as extremely nerdy poems — without burdening them with tasks for which they are unsuited.

Erin McKean is the chief executive and founder of the online dictionary Wordnik.com. She was previously the editor in chief of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press.

Oh, Those Prepositions!

Dear Stan,
Is there a reason for not ending a sentence with a preposition that
you can think of?

from Hartford, CT

I must admit I don't know where you're coming from. Correct usage in English and Science is something I've devoted my whole life to. Of course, if I say anything you can't understand, it will just become a new hammer you can try to hit me or another expert over the head with. There are plenty of people like you I can't hope to change the mind of. But then, I've dealt with people like you before. People who don't really want to learn, but just hope to find someone they can publicly disagree with. There's little I can say that your type won't find something to object to. But getting back to your question, no, there's really no reason for not ending a sentence with a
preposition, at least none I can think of.

Stan


Looking deeper into the question we find -

The saying attributed to Winston Churchill rejecting the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition must be among the most frequently mutated witticisms ever. I have received many notes from correspondents claiming to know what the “original saying” was, but none of them cites an authoritative source.


The alt.english.usage FAQ states that the story originated with an anecdote in Sir Ernest Gowers’ Plain Words (1948). Supposedly an editor had clumsily rearranged one of Churchill’s sentences to avoid ending it in a preposition, and the Prime Minister, very proud of his style, scribbled this note in reply: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” The American Heritage Book of English Usage agrees.


The FAQ goes on to say that the Oxford Companion to the English Language (no edition cited) states that the original was “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” To me this sounds more likely, and eagerness to avoid the offensive word “bloody” would help to explain the proliferation of variations.


A quick search of the Internet turned up an astonishing number. In this era of copy-and-paste it’s truly unusual to find such rich variety. The narrative context varies too: sometimes the person rebuked by Churchill is a correspondent, a speech editor, a bureaucrat, or an audience member at a speech and sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman, and sometimes even a young student. Sometimes Churchill writes a note, sometimes he scribbles the note on the corrected manuscript, and often he is said to have spoken the rebuke aloud. The text concerned was variously a book manuscript, a speech, an article, or a government document.


Here is just a sample of the variations circulating on the Net:

1. That is a rule up with which I will not put.
2. This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
3. This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
4. Not ending a sentence with a preposition is a bit of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
5. That is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put
6. This is insubordination, up with which I will not put!
7. This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.
8. This is the sort of thing up with which I will not put.
9. Madame, that is a rule up with which I shall not put.


One poor soul, unfamiliar with the word “arrant,” came up with: “That is the sort of errant criticism up with which I will not put.”


Then there are those who get it so scrambled it comes out backward:

1. Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
2. Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which we will not put.
3. From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
4. Please understand that ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.


I checked the indexes of a dozen Churchill biographies, but none of them had an entry for “prepositions.”


Ben Zimmer has presented evidence on the alt.usage.english list that this story was not originally attributed to Churchill at all, but to an anonymous official in an article in The Strand magazine. Since Churchill often contributed to The Strand, Zimmer argues, it would certainly have identified him if he had been the official in question. It is not clear how the anecdote came to be attributed to Churchill by Gowers, but it seems to have circulated independently earlier.

A Revenge Not So Sweet

Occasionally a phrase comes up in conversation that sticks in my mind until I find out more about it. This week, when talking with a friend about an illness recently suffered, the phase Montezuma's Revenge came up. Or out...

This is what I found.

Meaning

The diarrhea that is often suffered by tourists when travelling to foreign parts, in this case South America.

Origin

Montezuma II (also spelled Moctezuma II) was Emperor of Mexico from 1502 to 1520 and was in power when the Spanish began their conquest of the Aztec Empire. The sickness, colloquially known as the 'squits/runs/trots' and more formally as 'Traveller's Diarrhoea', is usually caused by drinking the local water or eating spicy food that visitors aren't accustomed to. It is a bacteriological illness, always uncomfortable, and occasionally serious. Most cases are caused by the E. coli bacterium.

The revenge element of the phrase alludes to the supposed hostile attitude of countries that were previously colonized by stronger countries, which are now, in this small but effective way, getting their own back.

There are many countries that were previously colonised that are now tourist destinations, and names for the condition reflect the part of the world concerned. These euphemisms are usually comic, reflecting the embarrassment felt by the sufferer and the amusement of the lucky non-sufferers. Of course, although Montezuma clearly had no reason to love the Conquistadors, his revenge isn't reserved for Spaniards - other names for it are:

The Gringo Gallop
The Aztec Two-step

Those unlucky enough to suffer from the condition in Asia might hear it called:

Gandhi's Revenge, Delhi Belly, The Rangoon Runs, Bombay Belly (India)
Gyppy Tummy, The Cairo Two-step, Pharaoh's Revenge, Mummy's Tummy (Egypt)
Bali Belly (Indonesia)


Travellers from Asia to the west are just as likely to suffer the illness, as it isn't caused primarily by insanitary conditions but by ingesting a strain of the E. Coli bacterium that one's body is unaccustomed to - an event just as likely in London and Los Angeles as it is in Cairo and Kuala Lumpur.

Delhi Belly and Gyppy Tummy were the first of these terms to gain wide usage and they appeared during WWII, when many British and US servicemen were fighting in North Africa and Asia. The earliest citations in print are from the Indiana Evening Gazette, October 1942:

Americans on duty overseas are learning also to guard against "Teheran tummy" and "Delhi belly" and in Alan Moorehead's A Year of Battle, 1943, which pretty much sums things up:

"Few set foot in Egypt without contracting 'Gypsy Tummy'... It recurs at irregular intervals and it makes you feel terrible."

As a phrase, Montezuma's revenge isn't particularly old. The earliest citation of it in print that I can find is from the US newspaper The Modesto Bee, February 1959:

In Mexico it sometimes is called the Aztec curse, Montezuma's revenge... and other colorful names. It can be either a mild or explosive illness.

See? In the end, it all works out.

Crosswordese

Crosswordese refers to hackneyed, obscure words or partial phrases, usually three, four and five letters long, used in crossword puzzles. These words are rarely, if ever, encountered in everyday conversation but often appear in crosswords because of the need for vowel-rich words or vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant (and vice versa) words in particular areas of the grid. Puzzles with too much crosswordese are frowned upon by cruciverbalists (crossword makers and solvers) and most publications have strict limits on their frequency in any given puzzle.

The following is a partial list of some of the most common crosswordese:

ADIT - Mine entrance
AERIE - High nest
AGHA - Turkish (Muslim) title of honor; a general
AGA - Turkish (Muslim) title of honor; a general
AGAR - Lab culture medium
AIT - River island
ALAI – Part of 'jai alai', a game played with a ball and racket
ALAR - Wing-shaped; Banned orchard spray
ALATE - Having wings
ALEE - Nautical term meaning 'away from the wind' or 'towards shelter'
ALETA - Prince Valiant's wife
ALEUT - Northern native (Aleutian Islands)
AMAH - Asian nanny
AMAS - Latin verb: You love
AMAT - Latin verb: He loves
AMATI - Famous violin (cf: violin maker, Andrea Amati)
AMIR - Muslim (religious) leader
AMO - Latin verb: I love
AMOR - Love, in Latin
ANIL - Shrub yielding a blue dye
ANKH - Egyptian hieroglyphic character (eternal life)
ANOA - Asian buffalo
APSE - Semicircular recess in a church
ARN - Prince Valiant's son
ARTE - Johnson of "Laugh-In" fame
ASTA - Dog of film in the 1930s
ASTI - Italian city known for its sparkling wines
ATRA - Gillette brand safety razor
ATTU - Westernmost Aleutian island
AULD - Part of "Auld Lang Syne"
BIRR - Ethiopian currency
BRIO - Italian: vigor; vivacity
CREE - Native Indian of northern Canada
ECRU - Shade of grayish-pale yellow or grayish-yellowish brown
(often describes fabrics: silk/linen)
ECU - Middle Ages shield; old French coin silver or gold coin
EDDA - Icelandic epic
EDO - Kyoto formerly
EERO - Architect Saarinen (St. Louis Arch, GM Technical Center)
ELIA – Part of 'Elia Kazan', Greek-born American film and theater director
ELO - Electric Light Orchestra
EMIR - Arab title of nobility
ENA - Bambi's aunt
ENATE - Related on the mother's side
ENO - Brian Eno, English musician, composer, record producer
ENID - Author Blyton
ENO - Music producer Brian ENO
ENOS - First-born son of Seth
EPEE - Dueling sword
ERAT - From Quod Erat Demonstrandum (QED)
ERATO - Muse of poetry
ERE - Before, poetically (e'er)
ERIN - Poetic name for Ireland
ERLE – Erle Stanley Gardner, American lawyer and author (Perry Mason)
ERNE - Sea eagle (osprey)
ERSE - Scottish Gaelic
ESNE - Anglo-Saxon slave
ESSE - "To be" in Latin
ETE - 'Summer' in French
ETRE - "To be" in French
ETTU - Part of "Et tu, Brutus?" (Caesar's last words)
ETUDE - Musical study
ETUI - Decorative case for sewing kit
EWER - Pitcher
GAM(S) - Attractive female leg
HOI - as in hoi polloi, "the masses" or "the people", usually derogatory
IDES - Mid-month dates
ILIE - Nastase of tennis; Author Wiesel
IMAM - Muslim religious leader
INNU - Northern native (Eastern North America)
INRI - Letters on the cross
IOTA - Greek letter or small, tiny (insignificant) amount
ISIS - Egyptian goddess of fertility (sister & wife of OSIRIS)
KLEE - Artist Paul
KUDU - African antelope
LANAI - Veranda (Hawaiian)
LARA - Dr. Zhivago's mistress (Julie Christie role)
LARI - Georgian currency
LECH - Lech Walensa, former Polish Solidarity leader and president
LEI - Hawaiian necklace (wreath of flowers)
LEK - Albanian currency
LEV - Bulgarian currency
LUAU - Hawaiian feast
NAN - Indian bread
NARD - Ointment or salve
NEE - Formerly called (woman's maiden name)
NENE - Hawaiian goose
NOLO - As in "nolo contendere"; plea of "No Contest" in a court of law
OBI - Japanese sash (Geisha wear)
OLEO - Margarine
OLIO - Mixture, elements of writing, music, art or food
OMAN - Neighbor of Yemen
OMOO - Herman Melville novel (1847)
OONA - Charlie Chaplin's wife
ORO - Spanish: gold
ORT - Food scrap or leftover
OTT - Baseball player Mel (1st NL player to surpass 500 home runs)
PABA - Sunscreen ingredient (Para Amino Benzoic Acid)
POI - Polynesian staple food
RANI - Indian queen or princess (wife of a Rajah)
RANEE - Indian queen or princess (wife of a Rajah)
ROUE - Rake (man devoted to sensual pleasures)
SARD - Gem stone
SARI - Indian dress
SKUA - Predatory seabird
SLOE - Fruit of the blackthorn (gin flavoring)
SOU - Old French bronze coin
SPEE - Part of "Graf Spee" German battleship
STRAD - Famous violin (cf: violin maker, Antonio Stradivari)
STOA - Covered walkway or portico
TARA - O'Hara estate in 'Gone With the Wind'
TETRA - Aquarium fish
TOPEE - Pith helmet
TYRO (TIRO) - Novice or beginner
UNAU - Two-toed sloth
URDU - Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in Pakistan and India
UTE - Native American