3 min
Stories for Young and Old Alike
May is one of the few months of the year that have controversial origins. One popular theory identifies May as the month of Maia, a Roman goddess of fertility and springtime. By this logic, May is all about the new and the young. Another traditional theory suggests, though, that May was originally meant to be the month of the maiores of Rome (Latin for “elders” or “ancestors”), to complement June as the month of the iuniores (“juniors” or “youths”). By this logic, May is all about the old! In this Word Stories instalment, we greet the mysterious month of May by investigating the unexpected origins or unpredictable stories of words evoking youth and age.
girl
In modern English, a girl is a young female person. The word girl can be used affectionately (or condescendingly) in referring to adult women, men perceived as effeminate, etc. Nonetheless, such meanings are treated as extensions of the dominant modern meaning: a girl is a female human who is still too young to be called a woman. This hasn’t always been the case, however.
The word girl is too old for its earliest forms and uses to be known, but its earliest recorded uses clearly mark it as a term for a child of any gender (as in Thomas Becket, The Early South-English Legendary, ca. 1300). In some places, girl was used this way until quite recently (T. P. Dolan and D. O. Muirithe, The Dialect of Forth and Bargy, Co. Wexford, Ireland, 1996).
At the end of the medieval period, for reasons that aren’t perfectly clear, the word girl took on a narrower meaning. English writers can be found reserving the word girls for young females (who were often previously called “gay girls”). Young males (or “knave girls”) were effectively removed from the category of girls, and associated more exclusively with the equally ancient but much less ambiguous term boys.
adolescent
The Latin verb adulescere/adolescere meant “to grow”, and it’s the shared root of the English words adult and adolescent. Parents who feel like adolescents spend most of their time eating may not be surprised to learn that the words adolescent and alimentation are etymologically related too. The French root of the English word adolescent—which looks the same in print—is derived from the Latin noun adolescens, which meant “one who is growing”. The noun is derived from the verb adolescere (“to grow”), which was itself derived by adding the affixes ad- (“completion”) and ‑esc- (“process”) to the base verb alere (“to feed”). This verb alere also lies behind food-related English words like alimentation.
The English word adult is derived from the French adulte and, thereby, from the classical Latin adjective adultus (“who has finished growing”). Adultus was itself derived from the verb adolescere/adulescere (“to grow”). Adultus was not used as a noun in classical Latin, however. While the feminine adjective adulta was used in line with this etymology, the Romans actually used the masculine form adultus to denote a prepubescent male, for some reason. So the straightforward language referring to adolescents growing into adults must have been borrowed later by French (and later still by English) from the feminine form, or it must have been inspired by Latin roots as opposed to Latin usage.
gaffer
The word gaffer can be used today as either a mild epithet for a remarkably old man or as the title of a particular worker on a television or movie set. Although very different at first glance, both senses are ultimately derived from the same old roots. Gaffer first emerged as a term meaning something like “senior” in the 16th century, possibly as a contraction of either godfather or grandfather. At times it worked as a respectful title, but just as often it simply meant “old fellow”—a sense that survives today. By the 17th century, though, gaffer was also being used by extension to refer to a person in authority, presumably thanks to its positive connotations of seniority. This kind of usage provided the workplace with a synonym for “foreman” in the 19th century, which was in turn popularized by film crews in the 20th century in the other sense that still survives today: in show business, the gaffer is the head electrician.
curmudgeon
A curmudgeon is an unpleasant (and probably ungenerous) old man. It’s not perfectly clear why. Some have suggested that cur evokes the temperament of an ill-bred dog, and others add that mudgeon may be derived from an old Gaelic term for “a disagreeable person” (muigean). When Dr. Samuel Johnson was writing his famous Dictionary in the 1700s, one of his more creative helpers floated the theory that curmudgeon comes from the French cœur méchant—“(a person with) a wicked heart”.
In any case, the word clearly describes an ill-tempered person, whether it’s spelled curmudgen (John Hooker, 1587), curre-megient (William Sclater, 1629) or even curmudgel (Charles Cotton, 1765). The more specific connotation of stinginess can be traced back to 1604, when Thomas Wright refers to “covetous curmudgeons” in his Passions of the Minde. In the 1600 edition of Livy’s Roman History, the translator Philemon Holland offered an imaginative explanation for this connotation, by translating “grain merchant” (frumentarius) into English as corne-mudgin (“corn-hoarder”) and noting that Roman grain merchants were often criticized for hoarding. Holland’s speculative spelling and etymology are both unattested elsewhere, though. His clever idea is therefore—like the cœur méchant theory—probably just a little too clever. We hope that judgment doesn’t sound curmudgeonly.
