ORIENT: towards the sunrise

　　We speak of Japan as “the land of the rising sun,”and we correctly call all of the far eastern countries the Orient,for the word Orient comes from th Latin term oriens,orientis,which means “rising.”To the Europe of the early days ,the Orient was where the sun rose.The East signified luck to the ancient soothsayers;the sunrise represented life and the beginning of things .These old time prophets judged the future by the flight of birds.If the sacred birds flew east when the priests released them from their cages,it meant good fortune.This superstition was taken over by the Christians ,and it was the traditional plan of the architecture of the early churches to place the chief altar at the eastern end of the edifice .In these ancient Roman augurs,however,if the sacred birds happened to fly west it presaged disaster,for the early fathers associated the setting sun with death and destruction.In the Latin language the verb occido meant “set ,”as the sun,but it also meant “die.”Of course, it was Latin occidens,occidentis,”falling,” “setting,” that gave to the Europeans and to us the name Occidentals in contradistinction to the Orientals, for we live in the land of the setting sun.

　　PLUMB: began with lead

　　When you try to plumb the depths of a philosopher, you are, in a poetic sense, letting down a piece of lead on a line in an attempt to fathom his meaning. This verb plumb, of course, comes from the Latin word plumbum which means “lead”, and a plummet is a lead on the end of the line Since a weighted string hangs straight, the term plumb itself took on the meaning of “straight”, as, “He is going plumb to Hell.” Therefore, anything “out of plumb” is off the perpendicular. Also when you plumment down, you are going down in the most direct fashion possible. With all of this, there is no mystery about where the name plumber come from. This is the handyman who fixed your bathroom pipes when they were only made of plumbum, or “lead”.

　　SHAPE: it came through many spellings

　　This simple word has appeared in many forms, the Old Norse skap, Old English gesceap, Middle English schap, and a host of other spellings in between up to just plain shape as we use it. All of these words have the idea of creation in them, of “shaping” with the hands. And from shape, in the form of ship, we have such words as friendship, penmanship,horsemanship. And worship, which simply means “worthy shape”.

　　TAPER: grow thinner

　　Tapering fingers are like a taper candle which is shaped so that it diminishes in diameter at one end. In similar fashion if we taper off in eating or drinking, our consumption gradually grows less and less like the narrowing cylinder of a candle. The word taper itself seems to come by many intermediate shifts in spelling from the Latin word papyrus which meant taper or wick, for the wicks in those days were made from the pith of the papyrus plant a plant native to Egypt.

　　TIDE AND TIME: first meant the same thing

　　There is the old familiar phrase: “Time and tide wait for no man”. The history of tidy will be easier to trace if we first take a glance at tide and time. Originally these two words had almost identical meanings. We still preserve the first sense of tide in such an expression as Christmastide, which really means Christmas time, and it wasn’t until the 14th century that tide applied to the ebb and flow of the ocean, which is , of course, connected with time. Once upon a time our word tidy meant timely, too. They would speak of a tidie happening, meaning “opportune” or timely. Finally tidy came to mean “neat”, “clean”, and “in good order”.

　　TRAVEL: was once suffering

　　If you don’t like to travel, you have a historical reason for your feeling. Travel, in the old days, could be bitterly uncomfortable and highly dangerous what with bandits, beasts, and barbarians, and the memories of its perils are still held in many terms. The word travel itself, for example, is from precisely the same source as travail which means extreme agony. They are both derived from the French term travailler which means “to work hard” and this word has as its remote ancestor, the Late Latin trepalium which was a device for torturing. When we say farewell, we are actually saying “travel well”. And even our word peril comes from the Latin periculum which meant “the danger of going forth to travel”.

　　ZENITH: over your head

　　We call the zenith that point in the sky directly overhead. The word zenith derives from the term samt in the Arabic phrase samt arras, “way over the head”, which is just what we mean by the word a millennium or two later. It would seem impossible that the spelling samt would ever end up as zenith, but here’s the story that will show how these spellings can wander around. The word samt had a variant form semt, and then in Medieval Latin days some fellow must have mistaken the form and he miscopied it as cenit. This version popped into the French of that day as cenith, and into English as senyth. The stretch from senyth to zenith is easy for an imagination to cover. This may help us to understand the wide variation in form that often exists between the original word and its modern version. The point in the celestial sphere right under your two feet is called the nadir, and this comes directly from the Arabic nazir, “opposite”, for in this case its spelling wasn’t monkeyed with much.