Word of the Day

Ballyhoo “blatant advertising or publicity” is a word with an unclear etymology. The word is an Americanism, meaning that it originated in the collection of dialects of English spoken in the United States, and along with fellow Americanisms such as hobo, jazz, and jitney, ballyhoo’s origins are obscure—though, of course, there abound several theories with varying degrees of probability. One proposal relates to ballyhoo’s earlier, now obsolete sense of “speech by a show presenter that boastfully advertises a performance,” which connects ballyhoo to carnival and circus lingo. From here, if this hypothesis holds weight, ballyhoo could be a shortened form of ballyhooly “Hell,” perhaps named rather unaffectionately after a village in northern County Cork, Ireland: the logic here is that, following the pattern of the phrase to raise hell, ballyhooly was clipped at the end and narrowed in definition from “Hell” to “clamor, outcry” and then again to “showman’s speech.” Other hypotheses about the origins of ballyhoo include an inversion of the elements that form hullabaloo “uproar.” Ballyhoo was first recorded in English in the 1830s.

Rosolio “a cordial flavored with rose petals or spices” is a borrowing from Italian, and though a rosolio can include rose petals among its ingredients, the drink is not related to the word rose. Rosolio is a variant, likely because of the influence of Italian rosa “rose” and olio “oil,” of rosoli, from Medieval Latin rōs sōlis “dew of the sun.” The term rosemary has a similar origin, deriving not from rose and Mary but rather from rōs maris “dew of the sea.” Latin rōs “dew” has relatively few descendants in English, other than obscure, obsolete terms such as rorid and rory, both meaning “dewy,” but Latin sōl “sun” is the source of solar, solarium “sunroom,” parasol, and solstice. Rosolio was first recorded in English in the 1810s.

Apparatus “a complex instrument for a particular purpose” is a borrowing of Latin apparātus “equipment, act of equipping, preparation.” Using the suffix -tus, which indicates verbal action, apparātus—literally meaning “equipped (thing)”—is the past participle of the verb apparāre “to equip, make ready,” from parāre “to prepare.” The stems of parāre, para- and pera-, appear in a wide variety of Latin-derived terms, from imperative and preparation to vituperate and separatist. As a result of the regular sound changes that emerged as Latin evolved into French, parāre still exists today, albeit in disguise, in French-derived terms such as empire, rampart, repair, spar, and even sever. Apparatus was first recorded in English in the 1620s.

Rufescent “somewhat reddish” comes from the Latin verb rūfescere “to redden,” which is formed from the adjective rūfus “red, tawny” and the inchoative infix -esc- “to become, to begin to be.” Our longtime followers should be well acquainted by now with the infix -esc-, which has cropped up in the recent Words of the Day iridescent, evanesce, and violescent. There are numerous words for “red” in Latin, but among the best-known terms are ruber, rubeus, rūfus, and russus. In English, ruber gives us rubella, after the typical red rash, as well as rubric, because instructions in legal and religious texts were once often written in red ocher. Rubeus is the source of ruby and (via French) rouge, while descendants of russus include russet as well as roux (from French beurre roux “browned butter”) and the names Rousseau and Russell (from French roux “redhead”). Rufescent was first recorded in English in the 1810s.

Philtrum “the vertical groove on the surface of the upper lip” is a Latinized version of Ancient Greek phíltron, of the same meaning. However, phíltron could also mean “love potion,” and it is this sense that is preserved in the English term philter (not to be confused with the unrelated homophone filter, which is of Germanic origin). Phíltron is formed from the adjective phílos (stem phil-) “loving, dear” and the suffix -tron, which—as an instrumental suffix—roughly translates as “thing that does/is used for something.” The stem phil- (also philo-) is the source of dozens of words in English, from philosophy (“love of wisdom”) and philanthropy (“love of humankind”) to Philadelphia (“brotherly love”) and Philip (“love of horses”). Philtrum was first recorded in English in the first decade of the 17th century.