Vocabulary Rocks! I is for…
Moving along in the alphabet to the letter I… more fascinating history lessons in etymology and strange words for your enjoyment! I LOVE vocabulary!
For a list of all my archived posts covering the topic: VOCABULARY
Inglenook
A delightful word I think all who visit my blog can easily relate to, even if we do not literally have a “corner by the fire” as a secluded and cozy spot.
Inglenook is derived from two words combined together: 1) the c.1500 Scottish word ingle, meaning “fireplace” and from Gaelic aingeal for “fire, light” and 2) the c.1300 word noke meaning “angle formed by the meeting of two lines; a corner of a room” of possibly Old Norse origin.
First seen in the 1770s, inglenook refers either to a nook next to a fireplace, or to a cozy bench next to one. It is a rare word these days, but quite evocative. This quote from The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1915 is vividly descriptive—
“Finally he lit his pipe, and sitting in the inglenook of the old village inn he talked slowly and at random about his case, rather as one who thinks aloud than as one who makes a considered statement.”
Ignoramus
The ancient legal institution of the grand jury now continues only in the USA, but it was once the standard way of deciding whether a person should be charged with a crime. It was called a “grand jury” because it was made up of 24 men, twice the size of a petit jury or petty jury as is normal in a trial. Grand juries were originally called from among local men who were expected to act on personal knowledge. If they felt the evidence was too weak their foreman wrote the Latin word ignoramus on the back of the indictment. This literally meant “we do not know” from the Latin verb ignorare (to be ignorant). In practice it meant “we take no notice of this”, the opposite of declaring the indictment a true bill and sending the accused person to trial.
How this abstruse foreign form from the specialized language of the law became an English word is due to George Ruggle. He wrote a play called Ignoramus, mostly in Latin, which was performed on March 8, 1615 at Trinity College, Cambridge, before an audience of some 2,000 which included King James I of England and the future Charles I. It featured a rascally and ignorant lawyer, the Ignoramus of the title, who used barbarous law Latin of a kind deplored by the university’s academics. The king loved the play but his judges and law officers hated it. It caused a huge controversy that led to the name of the play’s chief character entering the language.
Inurnment and Interment
Inurnment means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “the process of placing the ashes of a cremated body into an urn.” The original sense of urn was specifically “vessel used to preserve the ashes of the dead,” and the word, derived from the Latin urna seems to have been rooted in the Latin verb urere meaning “to burn.” Urn first appeared in English in the sense of keeping the ashes of the deceased in the 14th century, and would not refer to the general-purpose receptacle for miscellaneous items sense until the early 17th century.
Urn, therefore, is an ancient word. Inurnment sounds like a modern word concocted by a crafty funeral director. However, inurnment first appeared in print in 1602 and once again we can thank William Shakespeare! In Act One, Scene IV of Hamlet, when the hero first encounters and speaks to his father’s ghost:
“Why the Sepulcher Wherein we saw thee quietly enurn’d,
Hath op’d his ponderous and Marble iawes [jaws],
To cast thee up againe?”
(“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead. In a tomb. In a jar.”)
Beware because some versions of this scene render the unusual “inurnment” as “interment,” but that’s an entirely different word. Inter, meaning “to deposit the body of a deceased person in the ground,” first appeared in English in the 14th century based on the Latin interrare (combining in with terra, or earth). Muddying the waters further, the OED also says the verb inter, dating back to the early 1300s, means “to deposit (a corpse) in the earth, or in a grave or tomb; to inhume, bury.” Since a tomb does not have to be underground – the OED defining tomb as: “A monument erected to enclose or cover the body and preserve the memory of the dead; a sepulchral structure raised above the earth.” – the word interment is appropriate for ashes in an urn placed into a tomb.
Today both terms are used by the funeral business and cemeteries. For example, a publication called “Administrative Guide to Information and Burial at Arlington National Cemetery” uses the terms inurn and inurnment for placement of urns into niches at the Columbarium, and inter and interment for burials in the ground (of either caskets or cinerary urns).
Ilk
In Old English the adjective ilca meant “same” or “like” and survived in mainstream English until the sixteenth century, in the end being supplanted by same, from Old Norse. The word survive in the Scots tongue, especially in the phrase of that ilk. The meaning was, and still is, of a person whose family name is the same as that of the place he inhabits. Most strictly it indicates that the person is the proprietor, or laird, of the place.
The field and ground was chosen in St. Andrews, and three landed men and three yeomen chosen to shoot against the English-men, — to wit, David Wemyss of that ilk, David Arnot of that ilk, and Mr. John Wedderburn, vicar of Dundee. ~The Lady of the Lake, by Sir Walter Scott, 1810. Wemyss and Arnot are indeed places in Scotland, both in Fife.
Scots also used it to refer to the head of a clan, even if the clan name wasn’t derived from a locality, such as in a 1539 trial in Scotland referring to “Duncane Macfarlane of that ilk”, where Macfarlane isn’t a place name. This eventually led to ilk weakening its sense to mean people who had the same name because they were related.
Ilk later weakened still further to include people of the same class or who had some characteristic in common. This much broader connotation annoys language purists, though it has long since become common and is now regarded as standard English.
