Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 4; July 03

Word history

Level : Upper Intermediate to Advanced
Time : 20 to 30 minutes

In class

1. Give the students the Worksheet and tell them their task is to find and write in each word, working from the word's history and its current meaning.

2. Pair the students and get them to compare results. Ask the pairs to form fours and further compare results.

3. Give out the Answer Sheet.

4. Ask the whole group how useful they feel knowing the history of a word is. What, if anything, does it add to knowing the current meanings and connotations of a word, and the grammar round it?

WORKSHEET

word	old meaning/s	current meaning
1.	that which you call upon	the supreme being
2.	to jump on	to say bad things about a person, to make them angry
3.	to be stiff	to die from lack of food
4.	a spearleek	a pungent plant used in many cuisines
5.	little water	a strong drink
6.	a physical mixture of the Greek Goddess of Love and of the Messenger of the Gods	a person with male and female physical attributes
7.	spiral wings	a chopper
8.	a violent exclamation before starting to loot, rape and plunder	destruction or chaos (collocates with "wreak")
9.	pleasure at another person's coming	a greeting to a guest
10.	water of life	a Celtic product

ANSWER SHEET

1. God This word probably comes from the Indo-European ghut, meaning to call. So God is "that which is invoked". There is no etymological connection with good.

2. insult The sult part of the word come from the Latin saltare , meaning to jump. The Latin verb insultare meant to jump on. Old French took the verb over as insulter, meaning to triumph over in an arrogant way. English took the verb over in the above meaning and the present day meaning of to abuse appeared in the 17th century.

3. starve comes from Old English star or ster meaning to be stiff. From the 12th century on this English verb narrowed from the general meaning of to die to the more specialised meanings of to die of cold (still extant in Northern UK dialects) and to die from lack of food.

4. garlic Old English had a word gar, meaning spear, which is similar to goad. Hence spear leek.

5. vodka is a word that English borrowed from Russian in the early 19th century; voda = water; vodka = little water.

6. hermaphrodite According to Ovid, Hermaphroditos was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite. The words came into English from Greek, via Latin.

7. helicopter French coined the term in the mid 19th century from the Greek word helix, meaing spiral, and the Greek word pteron, meaning wing. The earliest record of the word in English is 1861, hélicoptère. By the late 1880's it dropped the final "e".

8. havoc is probably an early Germanic war-cry as they started to loot and plunder It came into Old French as havot, used in the phrase crier havot, meaning to loose destruction and plunder. The word passed from Old French into Anglo-Norman and then into English as havok.

9. welcome derives from Old English wil-cume, in which wil = pleasure and cume=come. The word modified to welcome in early Middle English, perhaps influenced by the French word bienvenu, or well come.

10. whisky/whiskey Working backwards you have whiskybae, which derives from usquebaugh, which was an anglicisation of the Gaelic uisge beatha, meaning water (uisge) of life.

Acknowledgment

The idea for this activity, and the examples used, came from John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins, Bloomsbury 1999.