I.
I had begun this article with a joke, a convoluted fictional story about a fictional Bob Turley that a few readers had expressed concerns about (see "Comments"), in that it reflected poorly on the late Mr. Turley. Since it wasn’t important (or even germane) to the rest of this article, I’ve asked that it be deleted, but if anyone reads this and would like to know my little joke, an e-mail to stevengoldleaf@gmail.com will do the trick.
II.
I like to read about where words come from, and how they got to mean what they do today. Give me an etymological dictionary, and I’ll gladly waste an hour or a day perusing it, and finding out stuff about common words I use every day without really knowing what the words actually mean, historically and right this second. Take the word "glove" for example: it’s from the proto-Germanic "galofo," meaning a covering for the hand, the source of which is probably (according to the online etymological dictionary http://www.etymonline.com) the prefix "ga" and the root "lofi" meaning "hand." You’ll want to put a "ga" on your "lofi" today, buddy, it’s cold out there!
The baseball-related oddity I noticed was that the word "lofi" comes from the concept of "flatness," as in palm, or sole, or shoulder blade, and is the same root word as appears in the Russian word for "shovel," which is "lopata." As in "Stan Lopata." Stan Shovel. The related Lithuanian word for "hand" is "Lapa," which is what my Yiddish-speaking (and maybe Lithuanian-speaking) grandmother used to call her hand in the context of "This heavy thing I am going to hit you with if you don’t stop acting up," halfway between "hand" and "shovel."
The modern German word for "glove" is also interesting, though it has zero to do with Stan Lopata. It is "handschuh," literally "hand-shoe" which is exactly the function that a glove serves, a shoe for the hand. Makes perfect sense that shoes were invented way before gloves were, and that one cold morning someone decided "Hey, how about fitting a shoe for our hands? I can do that." One generation after the invention of the shoe, or a hundred generations later?
There was a character in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, who gets eaten by the omnivorous monster Grendal, with the name of Handscio, but that’s only his name, not a description of what he wore on his hands. (The poem was written sometime before 1000 AD.) The earliest known use of the surname "Glover," someone who makes gloves, is from the mid-1200s, and the earliest use of "boxing glove" dates from 1847, both which make sense in trying to put together when the need for such terms would arise. People were making gloves long before 1200, I suspect, but not making last names much before then. Before 1847, and probably for a few decades after, gloves for boxing would have been extraneous and weird, but someone was obviously willing to be viewed as such.
III.
A little up on the scroll from "glove" is the word "glider," which was Ed Charles’ nickname at the end of his career on the Mets. Apocryphally, when Charles belted a crucial HR during the Mets’ 1969 pennant drive, the cry went up around the Mets’ dugout "Never throw a slider to the Glider!" The nickname wasn’t altogether complimentary to Charles, though it did of course contain an element of "gracefulness." The non-complimentary part implied that Charles, on his last legs as a ballplayer, was performing without the power of his younger teammates, just going on previously generated motion, as a glider might be compared to an engine-propelled airplane, slowly, smoothly, running out of energy.
A lot of Old English and Germanic words beginning with "gl-" have to do with "joyfulness" and "smoothness" and "brightness," and until the beginning of the 20th century, a common past tense of "to glide" was "glid," as in "He glid into third base." An older past tense of the verb was "glad," a word that would apply in both the archaic sense and the modern one to the cheery, graceful Charles. Someone on my old Mets-fan website once got off a good line when someone else remarked of an easy play that a Mets third-baseman muffed that Ed Charles would have caught it: "Ed Charles? RAY Charles would have caught it!" Ed Charles was a very positive force in the 1969 Mets’ clubhouse, not much of a ballplayer anymore, though when he first arrived he was briefly one of the best hitters on the team. (I usually batted him cleanup in Strat-o-matic on the 1968 Mets team.) "The Glider" is a great descriptive name for him, as "glide" is a word that sounds exactly like what it is.
IV.
In my previous article, I used the word "vapid" but after it was published I realized that it was one of those words that I’ve used lots of times over the years without ever actually having looked up what it means, where it comes from, how the meaning has evolved over time, etc. That’s probably how we use most of the words we use, and we all get away with relying on the Great God Context, but we probably misuse words all the time by not understanding what the words, technically, mean. So I looked up "vapid" in the etymological dictionary, and found that it means something like "empty" or "nebulous" (another word I use without knowing really what it means). "Vapid" comes from "vapor," most likely, something that is insubstantial while appearing to have substance. Good word, and I’m glad to have been a faithful servant to my God, Context.
Still in the "V"s, I discovered that "Velcro" comes from "velour" and "crochet," that "Vaseline" comes from "water" (pronounced "vasser" in German) and "oil," which I thought couldn’t mix, and "vinegar" comes from "wine" and "sour" ("vin aigre" in French). "Varsity" comes from "(uni)versity." I can do this all day.
V.
And in fact I will, but not today. Spurred by my understanding of how few words I use that I actually have a profound knowledge of ("profound" sometimes meaning back to the Proto-Indo-European), I tagged a dozen other words I used in the previous article by relying on context rather than any rigorous etymological knowledge. I’ll list them here, and run down the etymology in some future column. In the order I used them in, in "My Mother, Drunk or Sober," they are:
Polemic
Credo
Pragmatic
Heretic
Fervid
Lapse
Mutable
Mortals
Thwarted
Vestigial
Staunch
Utterly