Angela Tung Oversharing on the internet since 2005.

Some of you may think that adventure and etymology should never appear in the same sentence. If so, you’re reading the wrong blog.

I was doing some research for work when I came across the etymology for boudoir. The strict definition of boudoir is “a woman’s private sitting room, dressing room, or bedroom,” but refers to any room where one can retire in comfort and privacy and perhaps entertain close friends.

You probably guessed that boudoir is French origin, but do you know which French word it comes from? Bouder, to pout or sulk. So a boudoir is a room where a lady can go and pout in privacy.

It’s also apparently a kind of photography (which I knew but somehow forgot). So it’s also pictures of scantily clad women posing and pouting.

Then I wondered, Is that where we get powder room? I had always assumed it came from the idea of a woman powdering her nose, but then I thought maybe powder was a corruption of pouter.

Nope. Powder room indeed comes from the euphemistic idea of women delicately applying powder and makeup rather than pissing and shitting. It also used to refer to “the room in a ship in which gunpowder is kept.”

Scantily clad women, bathroom humor, and gunpowder. I told you it would be an adventure.

Mad Men housewife Betty Draper Francis and those hussies Don fooled around with have more in common than you might think.

We all know what hussy means: “a woman considered brazen or immoral.” But did you know it actually comes from housewife? The word housewife is an old one, originating in the 13th century as a combination of, you guessed it, house and wife, which are both Old English words. While house has always meant “dwelling, shelter,” wife once meant simply woman, the sense of which, says the Online Etymology Dictionary (OnED), “is preserved in midwife [and] old wives’ tale.”

While today housewife implies a woman who doesn’t hold a traditional job but manages a household (see house husband), it also meant “the mistress of a family; the wife of a householder; a female manager of domestic affairs.” Hussy, which originated in the 1520s, began as a shortening of housewife (the Old English word for house is hus) and, says the OnED:

gradually broadened to mean “any woman or girl,” and by 1650 was being applied to “a woman or girl who shows casual or improper behavior,” and a general derogatory sense had overtaken the word by late 18c. “It is common to use housewife in a good, and huswife or hussy in a bad sense” [Johnson].

Other hussy-like words also began with other meanings. Slut, attested to the 14th century, originally meant “a careless, lazy woman; a woman who is uncleanly as regards her person or her house; a slattern.” According to the OnED, Chaucer used sluttish “in reference to the appearance of an untidy man.” In the mid-15th century, slut also referred to “a kitchen maid, a drudge” (slut’s pennies were the “hard pieces in a bread loaf from imperfect kneading”); “woman of loose character, bold hussy”; and in the 1660s was used playfully, “without implication of loose morals.”

Minx, “a girl or young woman who is considered pert, flirtatious, or impudent,” first meant “pet dog,” and is of uncertain origin. It may be, says OnED, an abbreviation of minnikin, “girl, woman,” which ultimately comes from the Middle Dutch minne, “love.” Mink, in case you were wondering, may come from the Swedish menk, “a stinking animal in Finland.”

Tit, meaning “breast,” is a variant of teat, but tit meaning “any small animal or object” (like a titmouse) may have a Scandinavian origin (the Norwegian tita means “a little bird”), and in the 1590s referred to “‘a girl or young woman,’ usually in deprecatory sense of ‘a hussy, minx.’”

A quean (not queen) is “a woman; a female person, considered without regard to qualities or position,” and came to refer to “effeminate homosexual” in the 1930s or earlier, “especially in Australian slang.” While quean and queen are related, says Word Origins, quean comes from the Old English cwene, “woman,” while queen comes from cwen, “queen, female ruler of a state, woman, wife.” According to the OnED, “the original sense [of queen] seems to have been ‘wife,’” and was “specialized by Old English to ‘wife of a king.’”

A cukquean, says Word Origins, is the female version of cuckold, while a cotquean, which originally meant “housewife of a cot” or cottage, is an obsolete term for “a man who busies himself with the affairs which properly belong to women,” and “a coarse, masculine woman; a bold hussy.”

Now try telling all of that to Betty.

Last week for the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, I wrote about, what else, icebergs and iceberg words.

As often is the case, I’m finding, it’s the most common expressions that have the most obscure or complex origins. Take iceberg lettuce. We’ve all heard of it; we’ve all had it. But where does the expression come from? The etymology on Wordnik says “From its pale color,” but to me that seemed like just the tip of the iceberg (haha). According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the phrase attests to 1893. The OnED is very reliable, but I wanted another source to back this up.

To the internet! The first hit of “iceberg lettuce origin” gives me the Wikipedia article about lettuce which has a lot of info on the types and cultivation of lettuce but nothing about where the expression iceberg lettuce comes from, except to say that it’s also known as crisphead. The second hit is The Kitchen Project’s The History of Iceberg Lettuce. The page says that iceberg lettuce “until the 1930’s was known as Crisphead lettuce,” and that the founder of Fresh Express, Bruce Church, “was responsible for popularizing the idea of shipping lettuce across the US continent from Salinas, California to the spots on the East coast.” The page goes on:

Using ice they carefully covered the heads of lettuce and shipped them. Year around and all the way as far as Maine, as the train pulled into each stop, folks would call out excitedly, “The icebergs are coming, the icebergs are coming!” The name would stick. Before that people had to depend on what you could grow locally and preserve from the gardens.

The Kitchen Project seems to have gotten this story directly from the Fresh Express site itself, while this site from UC Davis repeats the story and adds the date of 1926.

Both of these sites are in direct contrast to the OnED’s date of origin of 1893. Who’s wrong?

I first looked in Google News Archives. My not very scientific method involves setting an end date and seeing if a particular word or phrase occurs before that date. Plugging in an end date of December 31, 1893 yielded no results. So I inched my way up, year by year.

The earliest citation I could find (that wasn’t behind a paywall) was from September 26, 1923, three years before Bruce Church is said to have developed his iced lettuce shipping method: “Pacific Coast Iceberg lettuce brought from $3.00 to $4.50 per crate of three to four dozen heads.”

Not satisfied, I went into Google Books and searched for “iceberg lettuce” in books published before December 31, 1893, and found five examples of “iceberg lettuce” appearing well before 1926. Here are three of them:

• From American Garden, published in January 1893: “New Iceberg lettuce, a new dwarf pea, an extra-early cucumber, a new cauliflower and a distinct squash all are novelties of the year, free for trial to Burpee’s customers.”
• In Station Bulletin of Oregon State College, iceberg lettuce is listed among donations in 1894.
• The Ladies’ Home Journal, published Christmas 1893, includes an advertisement for “new iceberg lettuce.”

So the Online Etymology Dictionary was right, and Bruce Church and Fresh Express are, well, lying.

I’m sure this isn’t the only use of false etymology to sell something, but for the life of me, I can’t think of another one. Wikipedia does have a list of common false etymologies but none are from are from retailers.

I was listening to an old episode of This American Life today called Thugs. I didn’t listen to the whole thing, but it got me wondering about the word itself and where it comes from. Then I was reading this article about Timothy Olyphant and Justified, and the word popped up again (“‘Not much call for cowboys these days,’ the thug says in a syrupy, menacing drawl”) and I knew I had to write about it.

A thug is commonly known today as “a cutthroat or ruffian; a hoodlum,” but originally the word referred specifically to “a member of a confraternity of professional assassins and robbers formerly infesting India, chiefly in the central and northern provinces.” Here’s more from Century Dictionary:

The thugs roamed about the country in bands of from 10 to 100, usually in the disguise of peddlers or pilgrims, gaining the confidence of other travelers, whom they strangled, when a favorable opportunity presented itself, with a handkerchief, an unwound turban, or a noosed cord. The shedding of blood was seldom resorted to. The motive of the thugs was not so much lust of plunder as a certain religious fanaticism. The bodies of their victims were hidden in graves dug with a consecrated pickax, and of their spoil one third was devoted to the goddess Kali, whom they worshiped. About 1830–35 the British government took vigorous measures for their suppression, and thuggery, as an organized system, is now extinct.

The word thug comes from the Hindi thag, meaning “cheat, swindler,” which comes from the Sanskrit, sthagaḥ, “a cheat.” Sthagah may come from sthagayati, “(he) covers, conceals,” which has the Proto-Indo-European base of (s)teg, “cover”  (Greek stegos). (S)teg gives us stegosaurus, so in a roundabout way, you could say that stegosauruses are the thugs of dinosaurs.

Thuggee is “the system of mysterious assassination carried on by the thugs,” meaning the thugs of old India, and is also known as thuggery. A thugocracy (a combination of thug and the Greek root –cracy, meaning “rule or government by”) is “government by a group of thugs,” of which the Word Spy cites the earliest citation as being from 1982. The term thug life seems to have originated with the music group Tupac Shakar formed in 1993, and now commonly refers to, according to the Urban Dictionary, “when you have nothing, and succeed, when you have overcome all obstacles to reach your aim.”

An offensive synonym for thug is Apache. Apparently it was used to refer to a “Parisian gangster or thug” in the early 20th century. Another one is goon, “a thug hired to intimidate or harm opponents.” The word also refers to “a stupid or oafish person” as well as a “cheap or inferior cask wine.” Goon comes from gooney, English dialect for a simpleton, and, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, was “applied by sailors to the albatross and similar big, clumsy birds” around 1839. In the movie The Goonies, the title refers to the birds in the seaside town, as well as the goofy, gooney-like kids. But where gooney originally came from is unknown, at least as far as I could find.

Goon in the sense of “hired thug” was first recorded 1938, “probably from Alice the Goon, slow-witted and muscular (but gentle-natured) character in ‘Thimble Theater’ comic strip (starring Popeye).”

I remember Alice the Goon from the Popeye cartoons. She always creeped me out.