Origin of the word....

[Sadurian Mike]

I found this very interesting but I don't think it deserves it's own thread, so I'll open a general one about the origin of words.

The word tawdry, meaning cheap quality but ostentatiously showy, comes from Saint Æthelthryth, aka Æðelþryð, Æþelðryþe or Etheldreda, but (thankfully) more commonly known as Saint Audrey. She was (probably) a C7th East Anglian woman of noble birth who became a nun, and who was deified after death for apparently not rotting in her coffin. The fact that she had been pious and founded a nunnery during her life might also have had something to do with it.

A local fair in Ely was named after her, being Saint Audrey's fair, and sold a lot of lace (presumably imported from the Low Countries). The quality of this lace became pretty poor, and the C17th's increasingly Puritan view of such decoration being cheap frippery led to the corruption of St. Audrey into Tawdry.

[jenny]

That's a nice little nugget :-)

Of course having written that I had to look up the origin of the word nugget, because it didn't track to anything I could think of, and etymonline came up with this:


1852, "lump of gold," probably from southwestern England dialectal nug "lump," a word of unknown origin [OED] +et. Another theory is that it is from a misdivision of an ingot (a n-ingot). Transferred sense (of truth, etc.) is from 1859.

[alexanderhoward]

The version of 'tawdry' that I heard, living in Cambridgeshire (St Etheldreda, Æðelþryð or Audrey being the patron of Ely Cathedral) is similar. It was that Æþelþryþ living as a nun suffered painful, red sores around her neck and remarked that they reminded her of the jewels she wore when a princess. At the St Audrey fairs, cheap costume jewellery was sold in honour of this story. Or possibly the story was invented to sell cheap necklaces.

[suze]

Although St Etheldreda was the founder of the abbey which was to become Ely Cathedral, the cathedral is not dedicated unto her but to the Holy and Undivided Trinity.  

The current building, conventionally said to have been started in 1083 although probably actually earlier, is built of Barnack stone.  The Barnack quarry was owned by what was then Peterborough Abbey, and the arrangement was that Ely need not pay for the stone in money, but must instead supply Peterborough with eight thousand eels per annum.  In theory at least, this arrangement remains in force.

There are only three offices of the Church of England dedicated unto St Etheldreda.  One of those is in Hatfield and has a carillon.  Just down the hill from St Etheldreda's and its carillon is a "rather nice pub" (or so TGH asserts) called The Eight Bells, which is of course named after said carillon.

It is by now closed and the site built on, but there was a St Audrey's School in Hatfield as well.  I have a vague feeling that cornixt, whom most readers will remember from another place, went there.  Other than that, the main claim to fame of St Audrey's School is that for a couple of years after it closed, it doubled as Grange Hill.

[jenny]

Woodsman and I today over lunch were discussing the origin of the word "stumped" for a problem you are having difficulty solving. OED records it as first appearing in the late 17th century.

Stump is from or cognate with Middle Low German stump (from an adjective meaning "mutilated, blunt, dull") according to etymonline. The political use seems to be from the practice of using the stump of a felled tree as a platform from which to speak. The earliest citation is from a 1775 Tory song, printed as a broadside, that mocked George Washington’s July 3 arrival at the Cambridge common to take formal command of the Continental Army: “Upon a stump he placed himself Great Washington did he.” (https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2023/01/stump.html)

Another version says that s early as the 13th century, this word was used to literally mean “to stumble over a tree stump.” It was in the early 1800s that Americans began using it in a metaphorical sense, and it’s believed to be because the literal use became so common as wagons ventured west–often getting stuck on stumps that hadn’t been cleared fully from the trail–and when clearing a field for plowing that it became a part of the everyday vernacular and so took on a broader meaning.

Etymologists also point out, though, that it probably stuck because it also called upon an earlier meaning of “to challenge or dare” that was used in the 1760s.

www.roseannamwhite.com/2018/11/word-of-week-stumped.html

[efros]

We always referred to such things as hustings in Scotland. It has an interesting etymology coming from a combination of the Old Norse words for house and thing, the thing part meaning an assembly.

[alexanderhoward]

Kibosh. Actually, nobody knows. I read it asserted strongly in the town of Cork or Kinsale or somewhere that 'kibosh' is fro an Irish word for 'cabbage' (cabáiste) and that the market place had stump with a stone cabbage as a cap, and when an auction in the market finished, the auctioneer would put the cabáiste on it, so if you are too late to bid, that puts the kibosh on it.

Actually, no one knows the origin, but volumes have been written about it.