8天攻克英语六级8000词汇(六)

　　CALCULATE: suggests pebbles
　　When a shopkeeper calculates his accounts, he is apt to use an adding machine. But in Rome 2,000 years ago the merchant figured his profit and loss in a more primitive way. He used what he called calcui, or “little stones” as his counters. So the Latin term calculus, “pebble”, not only gave us our word calculus which we apply to one of most complicated forms of modern mathematics.
　　CANCEL: a lattice of ink
　　The word for “lattice” in Latin is cancelli. In a business sense, when a clerk in the Post Office “cancels” a stamp, he makes a lattice of ink marks right across it. Cancel is from the same source as the chancel of a church-originally the lattice division that separated the choir from the nave-now the part of the church so separated. And the word cancellarius, “usher of the law court,” who was so named because he stood ad cancellos, “at the lattice.”
　　CAPITAL: from the human head
　　The word capital in the sense of wealth comes ultimately from the Latin caput , “head”. The Latin root of caput appears in scores of English words in various forms depending upon whether it came to us through the French or directly from the Latin. Both of our words capital and cattle, for example, are from caput, for in the earliest days a man’s wealth, or capital, was reckoned in cattle, and we still speak of a herd of a thousand “head”. A chattel mortgage is really a “cattle” mortgage, and up to the 16th century the English spoke of “goods and cattals” instead of “goods and chattels”.
　　CHARGE: from a Roman chariot
　　When you charge a customer for a purchase you owe a debt to Rome for the term you are using. The Latin word for the four-wheeled baggage wagon that Julius Caesar used in his campaigns was carrus. In later Latin carrus developed the verb. Carricare which meant“to load on a wagon，”and the French took this over as chargier. A “charge account,” of course, “loads” a person with the obligation of paying. We charge, or burden a man with his crime. You charge or “load” your mind with a responsibility. And in the olden days, they used to charge a musket with powder and sot. They “loaded” it and when they discharged it they “unloaded” it. Beyond this the Roman chariot carrus gave other words. Our car came up through the North French word carre, and the carriage we used to ride in came through the Old Norman French cariage. Cargo is another great-grandchild of carricare, ‘to load.” Cargo is “ loaded” on a cart. But most curiously of all we inherit the word caricature from carricare which sometimes meant to “over-load” and so o exaggerate, as caricaturists are supposed to do.
　　CHAUFFEUR: stoked the fire
　　A French word that used merely to mean a fireman or stoker and that eventually goes back to the Latin calificare, “to make hot.” Around the year 1900, in the first days of the automobile when it often was a steam-driven vehicle, the French gave the bantering name of chauffeur of “stoker” to the professional who drove the car. The term chauffeur derives from chauffer, “to heat,” and this contributed another word to English. The Old French form chaufer went into English as chaufen, “to warm,” which finally changed into our present word chafe which used to mean “to make warm by rubbing,” but now is most commonly used by us in the sense of making the skin sore or sensitive by rubbing. The chafing-dish is the only modern use that retains the original meaning of “heat.” And the chauffeur is no longer a “fireman.”
　　COAL: first a glowing ember
　　The word coal, spelled col in Old English, meant at one time a piece of carbon glowing without flame. Later coal took on its modern meaning; and confusingly enough, the word charcoal means something that has been “charred” and so reduced to coal. One of the earliest mentions of coal is found in the Saxon Chronicle of the abbey of Petersborough in the England of 852 A.D. The abbot had let some land to a certain Wulfred who was to send to the monastery in return, among other things, 60 loads of wood, 12 loads of coal, and 6 loads of peat. The type of hard coal known as anthracite owes the beginning of its name history to the Greek word anthrax, meaning “coal,” which was described by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus in a script he wrote on Stones aboyt 371 B.C. Bituminous, or soft coal, got its name from he Latin word bitumen, a mineral pitch found in Palestine and Babylon that was used for mortar. In the Douay Bible of 1609 we read: “Thou shalt pitch it (the arke) within and without with bitumen.” The coal called lignite is so imperfectly formed that it still has the brown look of decayed wood. Hence its name from he Latin lignum, “wood.”
　　COBALT: a devil
　　A tough, steel-gray metallic element, valuable to certain steel alloys, and useful in some of its compounds as a pigment. Its lustrous sheen often made the miners think they had discovered a more precious meal. Because of this, and also because the arsenic and sulphur it often contains was harmful to those working over it, this meal was regarded as the demon of the mines and was nicknamed from the German Kobalt, a variant of Kobold, meaning a “goblin.” The miners chose a similar name for nickel. In German it used to be Kupfernickel, “copper demon,” because this tricky ore looks copper and isn’t. We took the word nickel from he Swedish kopparnickel, dropping the first half of the name in transit. Nickel, then, is just a bit of he Old Nick.
　　COMPANY: eats bread with you
　　The term company corresponds to companion and this in turn derives from he Latin words cum, “with,” and panis, “bread.” A companion, then, is one who eats bread with you, a “messmate,” and when you have company at your house they share your hospitality. In its business use he romantic associations of the word company are drained off.
　　4. Word Histories of Your Garden
　　MISTLETOE
　　It’s too bad to rob the mistletoe of any of its delightful associations, but the beginnings of the word are anything but romantic. When we trace mistletoe back to its origin, we find it spelled mistiltan, and mistily comes, of all things, from a word meaning “dung,” and tan means “twig.” So here we have a “twig of dung.” This all grew out of the popular belief that this plant sprang from bird droppings, In a 17th-century essay we read that mistletoe “come onely by the mewting of birds . . . which feed thereupon and let it passe through their body.” The ancient Druids thought that the mistletoe of the oak was a cure for the various ailments of old age, and William Bullein, writing in 1562 in his Bulwarke of Defence Against All Sickness and Woundes said: “The miseln groweth . . . upon the tree through the dounge of byrdes.” We regard the plant as an invitation to a kiss, but the American Indians, being on the practical side, didn’t trifle with it in this way. They chewed the stuff for toothache.
　　NARCISUS
　　The history of this flower-name leads us into an involved love story of the Grecian gods which eventually contrituted three useful words to the English language. Echo, daughter of air and earth, was an attendant on Gera, queen of the heavens. She happened to offend her mistress, however, and for punishment was deprived of all spech save the power to repeat such word echo. In spite of her handicap, she fell hopelessly in love with the beautiful youth Narcissus, son of a river god, but he spurned her love and as a result Echo faded away until only her bone and her voice were left. In order to punish Narcissus for his crime Nemeses, goddess of vengence, made the youth fall in love with his own reflection in the waters of a fountain; and since such love as this could never be consummated, Narcissus pined away and finally changed into a flower.So from this we have our word echo, the Freudian term narcissism, and narcissus itself, with its handsome and usually white or yellow flowers.
　 NASTURTIUM
　　The pungent smell of these flowers caused them to be nicknamed “nose-twisters ” by the ancients. You see, the word nasturtium was made up of the Latin words nasus, “nose,” and torqueo, “twist.” It was the Roman naturalist Pliny who said, in the 1st century, that this flower “received its name from tormenting the nose.” And if you chew one of the seeds the bitter taste will make the meaning of the name more obvious.