BASIN:a soldier's helmet

　　You dont't have to tell a soldier that his helmet is often his only wsbasin or soup bowl. This word basin started in Roman days with the Late Latin term bachinus,"an eating lowl."In the Middle Ages, the knights of Charlemagne, king of the Franks wore cone-shaped metal caps or helmets.This word for this helmet was bacin, actually ,"a bowl for the head." Bacin slipped into English,then became basin. These words of ours proiferate, and before long we had bassinet or"little basin," that beriboned crib in which we put babies.

　　BESIEGE:sitting by a towm

　　This word traces through the Old French sieger,"to sit,"ultimately from the Latin sedeo,plus the English prefix be-, "by."When the enemy besieges a town,it sits by"it until somebody sives up.Or it used to ,at least,in the days before atomic fission.The Lation roots sed,sid ,and sess,form sedeo, came to us directly,without the changes incurred by passing through the French language.Therefore we have the session of Congress during which our legislators "sit";and those sedate paople who "sit"gravely in their chairs. Then there is the sediment that "sits" on the bottom and the sedentary jobs of the clerks.Or a nice, fat subsidy that lets you "sit" for the test of your life.

　　BOOTY:your share

　　The modern word booty comes from the Middke Low German word bute which meant a distribution or a sharing .When bute entered our language it began to mean booty as we understand it,something takenillegally and then sharedin the fashion of the pirates and freebooters of those days.Its spelling was influenced by the English word boot which meant profit or advantage. This we now use in such an expression as:"He sold him his camera and then gave him a couple of films to bot";that is , something besides, or in addition to,the article bough.But the word boot that applies to the covring that yu wear on your foot is merely a corruption of the Hindustani word lut,meaning "something plundered."

　　8. Terms of Science and the Professions

　　ACADEMY: named for a Greek farmer?

　　This is a pleasant story about a Greek farmer. It seems that a Spartan maiden, named Helen, was kidnapped by the legendary hero Theseus. Her twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, who are now in our heavens as two bright stars, searched for their sister without success until they met the farmer, Akademos, who seems to have given them some hint as to the whereabouts of the kidnapper and his victim. As a reward for his alertness the grove of Akademos was eternally watched over by the gods. It was in this grove that the great philosopher Plato held his classes. The grove was called Academeia, and for many years after his death his pupils and followers met in this same spot for their discussions. Plato never did verify the story of the farmer, but he gave us the word academy that now means a place of learning.

　　ALGEBRA: bone-setting

　　The ancients had to borrow a medical term to christen this branch of mathematics. They took the Arabic words al jebr, with the meanings al, “the,” and jebr, “reuniting what is broken.” Sometimes these words were used to mean “bone-setting.” Out of this they built a really impressive phrase for the new science, ilm al-jebr wa’l-mup-abalah, which meant “reduction and comparison by equations.” The Italians mercifully took the second and third words of this phrase and combined them to form algebra. Even as late as the 17th century the word algebra kept its original Arabic meaning and still referred to surgical treatment. For instance we read in the historian Halle: “This Araby worde Algebra sygnifyeth as well fractures of bones as sometime the restauration of the same.” But to the school-child today, it’s just a mathematical headache.

　　ANESTHESIA: no feeling

　　Sir Humphry Davy first accomplished artificial anesthesia in 1800 and in that period medical men would have had enough Greek to know that Plato used the word anaisthesia to mean “insensibility” from an-, “not,” and aesthesis, “feeling.”