botnet
The coordinated attack vector botnet was first named that around 2003, a compound of bot + net. Early botnets mostly focused on sending spam emails that got around simple filters, not the DDoS attacks we associate with them today. EarthLink, a major email provider at the time, claims the first major known botnet in 2001 was responsible for as much as 25% of all incoming emails.
The origin of -net is clear; the short variation of network was a productive affix in contemporaneous compounds like intranet and netizen. The other half, bot, had been in use for over 10 years to refer to chatbots and spambots in chat rooms like IRC. A clipping of robot, it quickly took on the specific meaning of “automated system sending text messages” in the early 1990s, semantically drifting from its use in science fiction (first appearing in 1969) where it just meant “robot”.
Robot itself is an English word with an unusually clear origin story. It’s first found in 1922 in the English translation of Karel Capek’s 1920 Czech play “R.U.R.” (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”), from Czech robota meaning “forced labor”. Karel’s robots were organic, but the term quickly came to be associated with machines, as assembly lines were then transforming manufacturing. A notable example of robots taking people’s jobs is the invention and deployment of fully automated traffic robots in 1922, which replaced human crossing guards at every major Manhattan intersection by 1926. In the intervening decades, this machine’s name changed to “traffic light” in most varieties of English, but remains “robot” in South Africa.
P.S. While researching this, I learned that another example of robots taking people’s jobs happened much later than I was thinking. Otis Autotronic elevators were first installed in 1950, eventually replacing elevator operators in basically every elevator building.
fruit
This is the third in a series of three Swadesh list posts:
- Middle English
- Norman French
- Why not both?
I saved the most interesting parts for last, the words at the intersection of those two trends. This first list is words where the Norman French word actually became the standard English word, implying that the Old English word either developed a different meaning or fell out of use.
| Norman French | Meaning | Old English |
|---|---|---|
| forest | forest | wood has different meaning |
| fruit | fruit | wastum was lost |
| flower | flower | blossom has more specific meaning |
| vomit | vomit | spew has more general meaning |
| push | push | shove has more specific meaning |
| count | count | tell has different meaning |
| river | river | ea was lost |
| round | round | sinewealt was lost |
Finally, there are concepts where there were three distinct words.
| Norman French | Former Meaning | Old English |
|---|---|---|
| grand | big | much has different meaning |
| petty | small | little has more specific meaning |
| dame | woman | wife has more specific meaning |
| marry | husband | churl has different meaning (!) |
| beast | animal | deer has more specific meaning |
| serpent | snake | adder has more specific meaning |
| pelt | skin | hide has more specific meaning |
| queue | tail | start has different meaning (!) |
| jamb | leg | shank has more specific meaning |
| entrails | guts | tharm was lost |
| respire | breathe | ethien was lost |
| doubt | fear | dread has more specific meaning |
| bat | hit | slay has more specific meaning |
| grate | scratch | claw has more specific meaning |
| pass | walk | go has more general meaning |
| return | turn | wend has different meaning |
| jet | throw | warp has different meaning |
| route | road | street and way have different meanings |
| soiled | dirty | horry was lost |
| just | correct | right has more general meaning |
blank
This is the second in a series of three Swadesh list posts:
- Middle English
- Norman French
- Why not both?
The surprise tool that will help us later I alluded to in my Old English post is that I also simultaneously did the same exercise for Norman French, to get a better sense of what extent English actually is a weird French-German creole language. To recapitulate, from 1066 to 1327, the kings and queens of England (including Richard the Lionheart and Eleanor of Aquitaine!) only or mostly spoke French. The nobles mostly spoke French and the peasants mostly spoke English, so the French vocabulary borrowed during this period tends to read more high class. In this essay I will thoroughly demonstrate that effect.
Compiling this list was more difficult than I expected, due to needing to determine which words were borrowed specifically from Norman French. Not part of the later wave of Middle French borrowings, not part of the later and continuing wave of Latin borrowings, and not part of the current wave of Modern French borrowings. Most of the words I could think of fell into one of those other three categories, which makes sense; Norman French words feel more foundational and inherent to English than later borrowings.
Here’s the list of words where we still use the Old English word for its original meaning, but also adopted the Norman French word to mean something else:
| Norman French | Meaning |
|---|---|
| comment | how |
| total | all |
| deuce | two |
| trey | three |
| quarter | four |
| peasant | heavy |
| straight | narrow |
| strait | narrow |
| meager | thin |
| peer | father (!) |
| arbor | tree |
| grain | seed |
| foil | leaf |
| herb | grass |
| cord | rope |
| grease | fat |
| plume | feather |
| chief | head |
| chef | head |
| main | hand (!) |
| beverage | drink |
| succour | suck |
| oyez (the attention-getting court word) | hear |
| stink | smell |
| battery | fight |
| catch | hunt |
| gist | lie down |
| lever | stand |
| chant | sing |
| joy | play |
| cool | flow |
| inflame | swell |
| powder | dust |
| fume | smoke |
| ardor | burn |
| rouge | red |
| blank | white (!) |
| plain | full |
| novel | new |
| ancient | old |
| boon | good |
| trenchant | sharp |
| noun | name |
That list is totally wild to me. Every Main Street everywhere is named after a word that once meant “hand”! It’s stunning just how essential some of those words feel to English. As well they should; they’ve been there for over 700 years.
As an addendum, here’s a shorter list where we kept the Norman French word, but only in an inflected form:
| Norman French | Meaning |
|---|---|
| verm(in) | worm |
| sang(uine) | blood |
| (uni)corn | horn |
| mang(y) | eat |
| pens(ive) | think |
| dorm(ant) | sleep |
| ten(nis) | hold |
| con(geal) | freeze |
delve
This is the first in a series of three Swadesh list posts:
- Middle English
- Norman French
- Why not both?
Since learning about the obsolete Middle English word scyld, meaning debt, I’ve been bitten by the “what other surprising obsolete Middle or Old English words are there?” bug. The problem is, how can you determine what words aren’t used any more? It’s like trying to notice all the annoying habits your friend doesn’t have. You could enumerate all the common annoying habits and laboriously go through them one by one, and still be nowhere close to thorough.
Anyway, I found a way to enumerate all the common words and laboriously went through them one by one. (I know it would be easier to find a list made by someone who’s already gone through this exercise, but there are two additional upcoming parts to this investigation that would have been much more difficult if I did.) Lexicostatistics is a subfield of historical linguistics that tries to clade languages based on the magnitude of differences between their common words. So linguists have spent decades coming up with lists of which words work best for this that I can repurpose. The lowest-hanging fruit I found is that Wiktionary keeps Swadesh lists (the first commonly-used list of meanings, from 1952) for hundreds of different languages, including the dead one I care about right now.
So I came up with a long list of meanings where Modern English uses a completely different word than Old English did. For comparison, I’m including cognates from other related languages. German (Gm.) last shared a common ancestor with English about 1500 years ago; Norwegian (Nor.) shared one about 1700 years ago; and Latin (L.) shared one about 4000 years ago. I’m saving some of the words for a subsequent post, but the remainder are:
Words that are completely disused now:
| Old English | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| fele | many | Gm. viel |
| swire | neck | |
| swelt | to die | |
| snithe | to cut | Gm. schneiden |
| quethe | to say | past tense preserved as quoth |
| tee | to pull | |
| welkin | cloud | Gm. Wolke |
| swart | black | adjective preserved as swarthy; Gm. schwarz |
| sweethra | right | |
| winestra | left | L. sinestra |
| mid | with | Gm. mit |
Words with different meanings now:
| Old English | Former Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| were- | man | L. vir- |
| rind | (tree) bark | |
| ridge | (a person's) back | |
| wit | to know (a fact) | Gm. wissen |
| ken | to know (a person) | Gm. kennen |
| to sting | to stab | |
| to sell | to give | |
| twinge | to squeeze | |
| mist | fog | |
| heaven | sky | Gm. Himmel |
| right | straight (not askew) | |
| stump | dull (not sharp) | Gm. stumpf |
| for | because | Nor. fordi |
Words we still use, but only in a more specific context now:
| Old English | Former Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| broad | wide | Gm. breit |
| man | person | "woman" comes from wif- "female" + -man "person" |
| fowl | bird | |
| hound | dog | |
| flesh | meat | |
| womb | belly | |
| canny | knowledgeable | |
| cleave | to split | |
| delve | to dig | |
| to stick (with a pointy thing) | to stab | Gm. stechen |
| knead | rub | Nor. gni |
| mere | lake | |
| barrow (location) | mountain | Gm. Berg |
| evil | bad | |
| foul | rotten | Gm. faul |
debt
The word for a thing that is owed debt first appears in English in the 1200s as a borrowing from Old French dete. As a reminder, in the 1200s in England, the peasants spoke English and the nobility spoke French. The King of England did not speak English. Usually, we retain the English words from that period, but sometimes we retain the French word instead, or both words (e.g. English-derived help and French-derived aid, or English-derived lake and French-derived lagoon). In the case of debt, we retained just the French word and lost the Middle English word shild (Old English scyld, German cognate Schuld).
So wait, if we borrowed the word from dete, and spelled it dette as pronounced in the 1300s, where did the silent ‘b’ come from? In the 1400s, literate people in England typically knew Latin and believed English should be more like the ursprache Latin. Well, in Latin, there’s this word dēbitum, meaning debt, that the French word is descended from. So scribes from that period all ended up agreeing to put the vestigial ‘b’ back into the spelling, cursing us to this day.
Dēbitum would of course later be borrowed into English on its own merits as debit, but that wouldn’t happen for several hundred years.