5 Old Words Taught New Tricks
By Adam Krause
One of the great things about the English language is the way it is constantly evolving (for instance, the phrase “Schwing!” was all the rage in the early ‘90s, and hardly anyone says that anymore. Ask an older sibling – or Wikipedia – if you’re unsure of the definition.) Sometimes, however, terrific words get swept aside in favor of shiny new ones. In this series, we will look at words that have fallen into disrepair, and try to patch them up by showing their modern equivalent. Sometimes a word has been replaced by a compound word that is more specific to today’s world, and sometimes the exact same word has a completely different meaning than it carried in another era. Most often, though, there is no longer an exact term that brings the same succinctness and zing to what it is describing as these antiquated words do. In our effort to bring back words from the past, here’s Eduify’s first installment of 5 old words.
1) Goliard
This originally referred to a group of hard-drinking university students in the Middle Ages who would wander from town
to town, singing ribald songs and satirizing the Church for engaging in ridiculous practices, such as the Crusades. They would, for instance, each drag a herring behind them as they walked to Mass, and attempt to squash each other’s herrings without letting their own be stepped on, in order to mock what they saw as the absurd religious rituals of their era.
Even after the Goliards faded out as a protest movement, the term remained in general use, finding its way into the works of medieval authors such as Chaucer, where it refers to a wandering minstrel. The closest modern equivalent would probably be the mysterious monastic order known as the fraternity, whose adherents wander from college town to college town in search of tailgating during a football game, take part in arcane initiation rituals like making new members eat live goldfish, and would love it if you handed them your guitar.
2) Daedal
If you are familiar with Greek mythology, you may have heard of Daedulus, who built a labyrinth so complex even he could hardly find his way out of it, to house the man/bull creature called the Minotaur. Since he was the only one who knew the labyrinth’s secrets, King Minos locked him in a tower to keep him quiet. He escaped by crafting wings out of wax for himself and his son Icarus, who ended up flying too close to the sun so that the wings melted, and plummeted into the sea. Daedulus ended up cursing his own skill as an artist.
The word “daedal,” an adjective, came to mean something that is particularly artistic. It also carries the implication that the thing it refers to is overly designed and complex, such as a Web site adorned with eight flashing banners that triggers sixteen pop-up quizzes. Perhaps that girl who sits next to you in math class and spends the whole hour adding individual hairs to the mane of the horse she is drawing is being a bit daedal. (Or perhaps, like young horse doodler Leonardo da Vinci, she is secretly a genius.)
3) Caravansary (or Caravanserai)
In the days when many goods were transported in long trading caravans across the desert, especially the silk routes through Persia, enterprising townspeople would set up “caravan palaces” for the drivers to stop at. These typically included stalls and fodder for the pack animals, baths, bed and dinner for the humans. There might also be shops selling travelers’ supplies, and excess goods unloaded by the merchants passing through.
Now that merchandise is more likely to be transported in trucks than on the backs of camels, the caravansary’s modern equivalent is a truck stop, where people who have been driving across the vast countryside for days can enjoy a shower, a nap in their rig, and a fast-food taco (personally, I would prefer to eat a camel.)
4) Bedizen
Bedizen: This is a modification of the even older term “dizen,” which means to dress a distaff in flax. (The distaff is the part of the spinning wheel that holds the unspun flax; flax is a plant once used to produce fibers for clothing. Contrary to what you may have learned from the Rumpelstiltskin story, do not count on using a spinning wheel to turn straw into gold as a reliable source of income.)
With the “be” attached to it, this word means to ornament something or someone in gaudy finery. You might, for instance, say that the family on your block who puts up their Christmas tree lights on the day after Halloween (and keeps them up until the Fourth of July) has bedizened their house in candy canes, glowing Santas and weird animatronic reindeer.
5) Dumbledore
Long before J.K. Rowling appropriated this word to christen Professor Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts, it was a slang term in southern England for the fat, fuzzy, drowsy insects now known throughout the English-speaking world as bumblebees. “Dore” is from the Old English for insect, and “dumble”, like the now-popular “bumble,” is an onomatopoeic adjective for the droning hum the bee makes with its wings. If you saw this particular wizard buzzing around your garden, would you swat him?
Today the word Dumbeldore has the greatest resonance with reference to Harry Potter. A loud and quite amuzing instance of this resonance is the viral YouTube video below.
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What old word do you think is ready for a comeback, and why?
