The new word I've learned recently that's been the most fun (or the funnest word, as some might say) has been dwarsligger. I got this from the lexicographer Jane Solomon, who linked to an article (or a narticle? see later) about them.
Dwarsliggers are small books that are bound like flipbooks—at the top rather than at the side, so to speak:
This format was invented by the Dutch printer Jongbloed, thus accounting for the definitely not-English flavor of the word, which means "crossways-lying" (dwar has to be related to athwart). The company has a patent on the format, which is supposed to make it easier to read, especially one-handed. What's interesting for us non-Dutch folks is that American publishers are now releasing dwarsligger-format books, starting with popular titles like the YA series by John Green. This Christmas therefore might present us with two gifts: dwarsligger editions of books we like, and the word dwarsligger itself.
On to origins. The other day I was reading something where the writer meant augur ("to foretell") but had used auger ("device for boring holes"). I thought I should double-check, which sent me to the dictionary, where I learned some interesting history behind both words.
First augur. This goes back to Latin, no surprise; an auger (note spelling, ha) in Rome was a priest-type person who read natural signs looking for omens. There are two theories about where this came from. One is that augur is related to avis ("bird"), since one of the natural signs being read was the behavior of birds. This seems not to hold up, in the sense that a word related to avis would have developed a different form than augur. A second theory is that augur is related to a word for "increase," which would make it a relative of augment and author (!). The thinking here is that these priest-type people were all about crop yields and increasing them.
Now auger, the tool. This was originally nauger, with an n on the front, an old Germanic word. But due to phonological confusion, the n wandered, so a nauger became an auger. This process is called misdivision or rebracketing. You'd think it would have been the type of mistake that was easily corrected ("Did you just say an auger? Dude, it's a nauger!"), but this happened back before we had easily consultable dictionaries, or dictionaries at all. And an auger was hardly the only example: rebracketing is also how we got an apron from napron, an adder from nadder, newt from an ewte, and others, and before it even got into English, orange from a Persian word narang.
It's almost sort of tempting to try an experiment in rebracketing. Start saying something like "I had a napple for a snack today" and see if people notice. And let us know what you find out.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.