COAL: first a glowing ember

　　The word coal, spelled col in Old English, meant at one time a piece of carbon glowing without flame. Later coal took on its modern meaning; and confusingly enough, the word charcoal means something that has been “charred” and so reduced to coal. One of the earliest mentions of coal is found in the Saxon Chronicle of the abbey of Petersborough in the England of 852 A.D. The abbot had let some land to a certain Wulfred who was to send to the monastery in return, among other things, 60 loads of wood, 12 loads of coal, and 6 loads of peat. The type of hard coal known as anthracite owes the beginning of its name history to the Greek word anthrax, meaning “coal,” which was described by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus in a script he wrote on Stones aboyt 371 B.C. Bituminous, or soft coal, got its name from he Latin word bitumen, a mineral pitch found in Palestine and Babylon that was used for mortar. In the Douay Bible of 1609 we read: “Thou shalt pitch it (the arke) within and without with bitumen.” The coal called lignite is so imperfectly formed that it still has the brown look of decayed wood. Hence its name from he Latin lignum, “wood.”

　　COBALT: a devil

　　A tough, steel-gray metallic element, valuable to certain steel alloys, and useful in some of its compounds as a pigment. Its lustrous sheen often made the miners think they had discovered a more precious meal. Because of this, and also because the arsenic and sulphur it often contains was harmful to those working over it, this meal was regarded as the demon of the mines and was nicknamed from the German Kobalt, a variant of Kobold, meaning a “goblin.” The miners chose a similar name for nickel. In German it used to be Kupfernickel, “copper demon,” because this tricky ore looks copper and isn’t. We took the word nickel from he Swedish kopparnickel, dropping the first half of the name in transit. Nickel, then, is just a bit of he Old Nick.

　　COMPANY: eats bread with you

　　The term company corresponds to companion and this in turn derives from he Latin words cum, “with,” and panis, “bread.” A companion, then, is one who eats bread with you, a “messmate,” and when you have company at your house they share your hospitality. In its business use he romantic associations of the word company are drained off.

　　4. Word Histories of Your Garden

　　MISTLETOE

　　It’s too bad to rob the mistletoe of any of its delightful associations, but the beginnings of the word are anything but romantic. When we trace mistletoe back to its origin, we find it spelled mistiltan, and mistily comes, of all things, from a word meaning “dung,” and tan means “twig.” So here we have a “twig of dung.” This all grew out of the popular belief that this plant sprang from bird droppings, In a 17th-century essay we read that mistletoe “come onely by the mewting of birds . . . which feed thereupon and let it passé through their body.” The ancient Druids thought that the mistletoe of the oak was a cure for the various ailments of old age, and William Bullein, writing in 1562 in his Bulwarke of Defence Against All Sickness and Woundes said: “The miseln groweth . . . upon the tree through the dounge of byrdes.” We regard the plant as an invitation to a kiss, but the American Indians, being on the practical side, didn’t trifle with it in this way. They chewed the stuff for toothache.

　　NARCISUS

　　The history of this flower-name leads us into an involved love story of the Grecian gods which eventually contrituted three useful words to the English language. Echo, daughter of air and earth, was an attendant on Gera, queen of the heavens. She happened to offend her mistress, however, and for punishment was deprived of all spech save the power to repeat such word echo. In spite of her handicap, she fell hopelessly in love with the beautiful youth Narcissus, son of a river god, but he spurned her love and as a result Echo faded away until only her bone and her voice were left. In order to punish Narcissus for his crime Nemeses, goddess of vengence, made the youth fall in love with his own reflection in the waters of a fountain; and since such love as this could never be consummated, Narcissus pined away and finally changed into a flower.So from this we have our word echo, the Freudian term narcissism, and narcissus itself, with its handsome and usually white or yellow flowers.