Unexamined Words

(Yeasaris, via Flicker)

Consider the following words. What do they have in common?

once

baseball

cupcake

They all have transparent etymologies. That is, once clearly comes from one. Baseball is a game involving balls and bases. And a cupcake is a cup-sized cake, or a cake made in or with a cup, something like that.

Here are some more:

storage

radiator

outdoors

It doesn’t take deep thinking to recognize that storage has to do with storing things; a radiator radiates; and outdoors has something to do with the outer side of doors.

And here’s one more helping:

necktie

tablecloth

dress (noun)

A necktie clearly is something you tie around your neck; a tablecloth is a cloth for a table; and a dress is something you wear when you dress.

All of which are hardly startling revelations. I’m more interested in something else: Despite the transparency of those words, when we actually use them in the daily flow of language, we don’t notice their etymologies.

Honestly, how often do you think of one when you’re saying once? Do you have even a passing thought for bases when you’re asking a friend to toss you a baseball? Do you think of cups or cakes when you’re eating a cupcake?

You do, of course, when you’re reading this column. You certainly do when you’re making a dictionary. But I would say 99 times out of 100, or maybe 999 out of 1,000, you just don’t notice.

Why should you? If you had to consider the origins of every word you spoke or wrote, you might never get through a conversation.

Many words, of course, aren’t transparent. And some transparent words do call attention to their origins—the cute selfie so popular with the millennials, for example. But there is a considerable class of words we use just because we’re accustomed to using them, with no thought to their back story.

Still skeptical? How about this: How often do you think of the city of York, England, when you talk about New York?

Just sayin’.