By Arrol Gellner
Ever wondered where ordinary domestic words like "cupboard," "drawer" and "counter" came from? I didn't think so. But as you've probably guessed by now, I'm going to tell you anyway.
Some everyday household words like "cupboard" and "drawer" have obvious roots, despite their pronunciation being slurred beyond recognition over the centuries. Other words have more surprising origins. For example, the medieval Latin word computatorium, meaning "computing place," eventually evolved into the French comptouer, which in turn morphed into the English countour, which finally brings us full circle to that modern-day spot where many a personal computer resides: the counter.
If you're still with me, you're an easy mark for the rest of these etymological tidbits:
- In the Jura Mountains of eastern France, the front doors of the houses traditionally opened into a room-sized, tapering shaft that extended clear up through the roof and was topped by a pair of opening flaps. In addition to having doors leading to the various parts of the house, the room brought in light and served as an escape hatch when the house was snowbound. Most importantly though, it formed a sort of combined fireplace and smokehouse in which hams and sausages could be hung to cure. And that's where we get the term foyer-French for fireplace.
- In medieval times, farmhouse lofts were often reached by an outside ladder that led to a door projecting from the sloping roof. After the adoption of inside stairs made getting to the loft more convenient, the room began to be used for sleeping, and the door was replaced by a window-hence, dormer, from the Middle French dormeor, "dormitory."
- The medieval farmhouse was also quite intimate with the barnyard, to put it politely, and a gust of wind could bring all manner of straw and debris skating in through an open front door. To prevent this, a plank was fastened across the base of the doorway to keep the stuff out-literally, a "thresh-hold."
- In the seventeenth century, when ladies were considered too delicate to think about business, politics or anything else of consequence, every large house had a room where male guests could "withdraw" after dinner to smoke cigars and talk about manly subjects. Linguistic laziness eventually shortened "withdrawing room" into just plain "drawing room."
- In Victorian times, foul gases were still thought to cause diseases such as malaria (literally, "bad air"). Therefore, when the advent of piped-in water during the 1880s allowed the toilet to be moved indoors, it was placed in its own tiny room to prevent those nasty sewer gases from escaping into the house. That's where we get the quaintly delicate term "water closet."
- Occasionally, architecture itself has inspired new English words. In the Middle Ages, long before the advent of wiretaps and unsecured e-mail, nosey citizens would simply peer into a home's windows to get the latest scoop on its occupants. If it happened to be raining, this put them in the drip line of the roof eaves, and hence that sort of person became known as an "eaves-dropper."
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