Word of the Day

Moonshot, “a launching of a spacecraft to the moon,” a transparent compound of moon and shot, entered English in 1949, near the beginning of large-scale rocket development in the U.S. Moonshot in its extended sense “a challenging and innovative project” first appears in 1967.

Judder as a verb means “to vibrate or shake violently,” and as a noun, “violent shaking.” It is first recorded in 1926 and refers to the shaking of automobiles (or their parts); it was later applied to aircraft. Judder has no precise etymology: it may be a combination of jolt or jerk and shudder, or it may be a variant pronunciation of shudder.

Pecuniary, “relating to money,” comes from the Latin adjective pecūniārius, a derivative of pecūnia “property, possessions, wealth, money,” itself a derivative of pecū “flock, herd, farm animals,” livestock being a very important source of wealth in early farming societies. Pecū and its related nouns are derivatives of the Proto-Indo-European noun peku- “sheep,” from the root pek-, pok- “to pluck, fleece, card (wool, flax).” Peku- is the source of Umbrian pequo “cattle” (Umbrian was an Italic language spoken in Umbria, north of Rome), Greek pókos and pékos “sheep’s wool, fleece,” and Lithuanian pekus “cattle.” By regular phonetic change peku- becomes fehu- in Proto-Germanic, becoming Gothic faihu “possessions, property,” German Vieh “cattle, beast, brute,” Old English feoh, fioh, feh “cattle, property (in cattle),” Middle English fe, feo, feh “livestock, herd of livestock, movable property, wealth, money.” Modern English fee “charge, payment, sum paid, “ but also “landed estate, inherited estate,” comes partly from the Middle English and Old English nouns, but fee in the sense “inherited estate, feudal estate” also comes from Old French fieu, fief “estate in land” and Anglo-French fe, fee, fie, from Germanic fehu. Pecuniary entered English in the early 16th century.

Everyone, unfortunately, has had experience with a nudnik, “a persistently dull, boring pest.” Nudnik is plainly a Yiddishism, a derivative of the Yiddish verb nudyen “to bore, pester.” Nudyen may come from Polish nudzić “to weary, bore,” or Russian nudit’ “to wear out (with complaints, pestering).” The Yiddish suffix -nik, adopted into English as a noun suffix that refers to persons, usually derogatorily, involved in a political cause or group (such as beatnik, peacenik), is also of Slavic origin. The personal suffix -nik appears in English as early as 1905, but the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, literally “traveling companion,” popularized -nik ad nauseam. Nudnik entered English in the first half of the 20th century.

The noun derring-do, “daring deeds; heroic daring,” has a curious history. In Middle English the phrase durring don, durring do meant “daring to do,” durring being the present participle of durren “to have the courage (to do something),” modern English dare, and don, do being a present infinitive verb, modern English do. Chaucer uses the phrase “correctly” is his Troilus and Criseyde: Troilus was nevere… secounde / In durryng don that longeth to a knight (“Troilus was never… second in daring to do what was fitting for a knight”). Derrynge do, one of the later spellings of durring don, was misinterpreted by Edmund Spenser as a noun phrase meaning “manhood and chivalry,” and Spenser’s mistake was picked up and passed on by writers and historians like Sir Walter Scott. Derring-do entered English (spelled durring don) in the 14th century, Spenser’s derring-doe in the second half of the 16th century.