Irk

"She was a little irked," I said to a friend, and he gave me a blank look.


"I mean, she was annoyed, a little angry," I said. "That's what irked means...."


Well, it's a word everyone knows, but where does it come from? I was betting the Scottish.


But as usual, I was wrong. It comes from old Norse--the forerunner of modern Norwegian. Not a surprise, really--the Norwegians tend to get annoyed easily!

Bounty

"Ive never heard of the Bounty," said my friend Moses.  We were talking about the ship--and that to me was incredible.  "I just thought bounty was a paper towel...."

"What!  Bounty is a perfectly wonderful word!  It means abundance, generosity.  It's also a reward--in Puerto Rico, there's talk of putting a bounty on iguanas, our local plague.  Kill one and you get ten bucks!"

OK--so what I didn't know is that it comes from Latin--though I suspected that--goes through old French, and is related--duh!--to another word.  Bonus!

Gumption

"Well, show a little gumption," my mother often said.  I knew what she meant--gumption means initiative, courage, common sense.  It's a word every American knows.  If she hadn't said "gumption" she could have said, "well, just get out there and do it!"

Right--but where does it come from?  I just looked it up--it's a Scottish word.  No surprise there--the Scots have plenty of gumption!

Batty

This is driving me batty, I thought, as I tried to program in VBA.  And then it struck me--"batty," the word for today!  Batty is another word for crazy....

Well, we know what a bat is--but where does this use come from?  I looked it up, and instantly remembered--it's from an expression "bats in the belfry."  Of course, the next question is "what's a belfry?"  Well, it's the place in the tower of a  church (called "steeple") where the church bell is--and where there are bats.

So saying a person has"bats in the belfry" means they have bats, not brain, up above.

Haggard

What's haggard? An adjective meaning badly dressed, exhausted, and emotionally distressed.  It's synonym is another fine word--gaunt.

And the word--improbably--comes from Old French, through German.  It meant a wild hawk, or raptor.  So how does that translate to an adjective meaning exhausted and depressed?  Your guess is as good as mine.....  

Snigger

"Stop sniggering!" my mother always directed.  So what did she mean?

To snigger is to laugh quietly and, most importantly, disrespectfully.  The word is also the a noun.

And where did it come from?  The dictionary suggests that it's an alteration of another word for the same thing--snicker.  And that word?  "Perhaps imitative"says the dictionary.  But to me, that sounds like a stretch....

Whack, out of

"Things are out of whack," said a friend.  I knew what he meant--the situation was disordered and messy.  And I knew what a whack was--it's a strong blow or strike.  But what a strange word--whack?  Where does it come from?  And why can something be out of whack but not IN whack?

The word can be traced to the 1700's, and comes into English from the Scottish.  That much I know.  But as to the rest--sorry, that's a mystery!