Just a jiffy

This morning, on ABC Radio Melbourne, the presenter was having fun with 'useless facts'. I love useless information, because it's never actually useless.

They talked about the word jiffy. It turns out that this term has a couple of specific meanings, apart from its handiness in referring to an indeterminate short period of time. I looked around on the Net and found this link to its meaning in physics, chemistry and computer science.

I've arrived at the stage of life where there's not much room in my brain for new information, so I'll leave it to you to follow the link and discover this not-useless fact.

It's believed the word has been in use since at least the late eighteenth century.  The English Language and Usage site quotes it in a text from 1780. The lengthy discussion on the site also mentions the variant jiffin from 1767.

The Phrase Finder says the coiner of the word jiffy did not refer to a specific item that epitomised quickness, but to me this seems strange. There's never a totally random nature to the coining of a new word. I notice that in the examples given of idioms of similes that do refer to an existing item that was known to be speedy, one is 'as fast as greased lightning.'

This gels with what was said on The English Language and Usage site - that jiffy was originally a thieves' cant term for lightning.

It beats me why thieves would have needed a secret word for lightning. But that's language for you - interesting and mysterious.

New Year, new post

First post of 2020 - hopefully not the only one!

Many months ago, a bothersome sales rep managed to corral me into listening to his spiel about a body lotion, and the small sachet he gave me as a sample has been sitting on my chest of drawers, waiting for me to use it. (I'm not going to waste it, because I'm a fanatic about making use of all the world's resources, even a three-centimetre square packet of body lotion.)

Today I noticed the wording on it:

My decades-old schoolgirl French suggested that the word Lavande has something to do with washing, so I looked up the origin of lavender at The Online Etymology Dictionary.

Sure enough, I had remembered correctly (reassuring, at my age, to know my memory still works).

Here's what it said:

lavender (n.)"fragrant plant of the mint family," c. 1300, from Anglo-French lavendre, Old French lavendre, "the lavender plant," from Medieval Latin lavendula "lavender" (10c.), perhaps from Latin lividus "bluish, livid". [This was followed by a  referral to a link for the word livid,  in relation to whether livid means purple-colored or pale-colored.]  If so it probably was associated with French lavande, Italian lavanda "a washing" (from Latin lavare "to wash;" from PIE root *leue- "to wash") because it was used to scent washed fabrics and as a bath perfume.

So far, interesting, but nothing I hadn't expected. However, the next bit fascinated me: 

The adjective meaning "of a pale purple color, of the color of lavender flowers" is from 1840; as a noun in the color sense from 1882. An identical Middle English word meant "laundress, washerwoman;" also, apparently, "prostitute, whore; camp follower" and is attested as a surname from early 13c.

So, the usual disparity in use of language for female activities compared to male ones. 

And I had to spare a thought for those women who followed medieval armies. Not only did they have to provide sexual favours to their 'protectors', but had to wash the soldiers' dirty clothes too!

The Grammarphobia blog has a discussion of this word also, and it's a great read. In part, it says:

But no, the obsolete “lavender” that means a washerwoman is probably not related to the other “lavender,” the plant that produces the fragrant pale-purple flowers.
The botanical word “lavender” (later also used for the scent and the color) came into English before 1300 from Anglo-Norman and Old French (lavandre), the OED says. The original source was a medieval Latin word for the plant, first spelled livendula (or perhaps lividula), and later lavendula. As the OED explains, some etymologists think the ultimate source may be the classical Latin adjective lividus (bluish, livid).
If so, the two “lavenders” aren’t etymologically connected, though they later became associated because of the use of lavender perfumes, oils, and dried flowers in caring for linens.

I came across an article called 'Sex and the Soldier in Lancastrian Normandy, 1415 to 1450,' with lots of information about attitudes towards women who travelled with armies, and although I didn't resolve my confusion about the etymology of the two words, I enjoyed reading it.