Ruminating “Etymology”
by Grace Ellis,
Winston-Salem, NC

My high school Latin teacher, Miss Duerson, taught us about etymology, the study of all the words derived from a basic root. We used to have contests to see who could identify the largest number of words in a family tree. For example, we could look for the descendants of spir, which means “breath.” Its offspring include spiritual, inspire, respiratory, conspiracy, and others, spreading like weeds from that single root.

I like to work in the opposite direction, tracing a word, or a peculiar phrase (what Miss Duerson would have called an idiom) back to its roots. During this quarantine, when we are spending more time together, my husband Stewart and I have made a game of looking up expressions like “hunker down,” “batten down the hatches,” and “cattywampus,” to see where they came from. (I’ll leave it to you to imagine how those terms happened to come up in our breakfast conversation.)

One day, when Stewart had made coddled eggs, we decided to check out the origin of that word. We knew that it currently has two meanings—"to cook at just below boiling” and “to pamper in an overprotective way,” usually a rebuke to overly indulgent parents. Apparently, the connection between these two meanings has to do with a long-ago custom of warming liquids to give to people who were seriously ill—to coddle them with a coddled beverage. Somehow this investigation produced a link to the way that adult birds feed their recently hatched offspring by eating food, often storing it in a “crop” or “craw” above their stomachs, and then regurgitating it into the throats of the hatchlings. While we were having our conversation about coddling, we could look out the window and see baby bluebirds opening their beaks and squawking until their father put fragments of meal worms down their throats.

Another word of the day arose when I reminisced about how Stewart used to ruminate on his unwritten sermon as he worked in the garden through the week; and how, when I get stuck in something I am trying to write, I often take a walk and ruminate as the words slide into place in my mind. Ruminate, we discovered, comes from “rumen,” meaning the “gullet,” and originally it described the way that goats (and other ruminants) chew their cud. Seated on our screen porch, we could see our pet goats lying on the picnic table and doing just that. So, it appears that two words with no obvious connections—coddle and ruminate—may both refer to food processing.  Who would have thought?

With these word games we fritter away a considerable amount of time. (And that  expression, first appearing in 1728, means” to waste little by little,” and probably comes from the noun “fritter,” which means “fragment” or “shred.” Its connection to “corn fritters” is uncertain. Are these explorations a waste of time? Or can we chalk them up as a productive exercise in the discipline of etymology?

Copyright 2020, Grace Ellis