Someone has said that if you think about any name long enough, it starts to sound funny. That can be said, it seems, of most words too. But I think that there are some particular words in common parlance that are rather peculiar right from the get-go.
Quite a while ago, after pondering the aforesaid linguistic oddities, I decided that it’d be fun to dig up the etymology of a few of them and make it into a blog post. What follows will, I hope, demystify the histories of these terms—well, five of them anyway.
Concessions
This is the one that got me started puzzling about weird words. I was at a large event complex, with hundreds of people milling about, and there, in large lettering, was a sign advertising “Concessions” in a particular area of the building. Of course, I know all about concessions--anyone who has spent any time around organized sports (particularly baseball) knows that the concessions stand is the place to go for snow cones or licorice ropes. But as I read the sign, I mused to my friend standing nearby as to why a booth that sells (semi) cheap refreshments at events ever earned such an odd title. Is a concessions stand a place where you concede that you’re hungry? Or you concede that you are getting a really bad deal by paying $7 for a 4 inch hot dog?
Well, as it turns out, the concession stand is the result of someone conceding something to someone else—but it’s not the customer’s money. According to National Public Radio, a “concession” in this context is the “privilege that a government or commercial organization would grant to a company or individual to operate under certain conditions. In North America, it comes to mean leasing out an area to a business so they can operate.” So, thinking back to my childhood baseball park memories, the little concession shack selling overpriced candy was operating by permission, by concession, of the city’s Parks and Recreation department. Now it makes sense!
Upholstery
Every other word that I can think of (“couch” or “chair” or “covering” or “seat” ) having to do with upholstery doesn’t even closely resemble the parts of that very strange word. So how in the world did we settle on calling putting new seat covers on your dining room chairs upholstery?
Author Paul McFedries gives the explanation in his The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Weird Word Origins. He begins with uphold, which means “ to support physically; to keep from falling.” In the 1300s, an upholder, was a “maker or repairer of small wares or furniture.” Over the course of 300 years, upholder morphed into upholsterer, which “referred to a tradesman or shopkeeper who made or repaired furniture, particularly the kind that used stuffing covered with fabric.” In 1647, that particular type of material became known as upholstery.
Of course, that makes terrific sense since most of us visit upholstery shops to keep our aging sofas or car interiors from falling into total disrepair. You could say that the value of our furniture is in the eye of the upholder...or, well, the upholsterer.
Colonel
My German maternal grandmother emigrated to the United States when she was a youngster. She told me that learning English was exasperating at times—and colonel was one of the words that she specifically mentioned as being a chief culprit.
The wordsmiths at Grammarphobia provide a fascinating, but messy history of this military term. Apparently, our English version owes its spelling to the old Italian word colonello , which meant a commander of a regiment. Colonello in turn comes from colonna which means “column”; colonna is the derivative of the Latin columna which means "pillar." Purportedly, the colonello was the military officer leading the colonna of soldiers.
The messy business is that colonello entered the Middle French as coronel. The English got coronel from the French and we Americans inherited that pronunciation from our mother country. Coronel eventually changed to colonel in its spelling, but the pronunciation, for large segments of the English-speaking world, adheres to the original French mistake, forever confusing a military officer with a piece of corn.
Drat…why didn’t they just say “the guy in charge?"
Laundry
For a word that designates a task that dominates so much of our time and energy, the etymology of laundry is really quite simple.
The folks over at Oxford University Press report that laundry was originally lavandry, an Old French word with the root lave¢ (think lavatory on airplanes!), meaning “to wash.” So, it’s appropriate that a place (the laundry room) , action (laundering) and thing (the pile of laundry) all point back to the act of washing.
Caboose
Literally last on the tracks (and in this post) but not least, is the rather silly-sounding caboose. This one seems like someone combined a cab and a moose to form one mechanical creature. But in fact, caboose has far more to do with cooking than it does with trains.
Evan Morris, of The Word Detective, gives a delightful summary both of what a caboose is and the origin of its unusual name:
A “caboose” is a little house on wheels that hooks onto the back end of a train. It’s got windows, bunk beds, a galley for cooking and an office for the conductor. Some cabooses (I keep wanting to type “cabeese”) even have a little cupola on top so the conductor can keep an eye on things all the way to the front of the train.
The first “caboose,” however, had no connection to railroads. When the word first appeared in English in the mid-18th century, it meant a small cooking cabin or kitchen on the deck of a merchant sailing vessel. “Caboose” was also used to mean the cast iron cooking stove inside the cabin. The word “caboose” comes from the Dutch “kabuis” (or Low German “kabuse”) meaning “cabin on a ship’s deck.” The use of “caboose” to mean a crew car on a railway train arose in the mid-19th century. That was the beginning of the heyday of long-distance rail transport in the US, so it made sense to have eating and sleeping facilities on freight trains that often didn’t stop for hundreds of miles.
I had no idea that's what a caboose for, and I'll bet you didn't either.
So there you have it! Now you have a better idea of the origin of these weirder words. Can you think of some others?
Meantime, I have to go do some caboosing at the concessions stand I've got over at Colonel's Laundry Mat and Upholstery.
