Sedate Dictionary Publisher Lightens Up

“Bimbo,” a word much in vogue in the scandal-ridden ‘80s, was first used as a relatively sexless term for lackluster males of the Roaring Twenties. The slightly stuffy word “academy” has a much racier past--a daring exploit involving a youthful Helen of Troy.

From “bunk,” the unfortunate legacy of a long-winded congressman, to “zany,” derived from the word for a 16th-Century Italian clown, a new book by dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster Inc. examines the strange stories and forgotten figures lurking behind everyday words.

“This book was a little bit more fun to work on than the usual things we do here,” said Frederick C. Mish, editorial director of Merriam-Webster.

“Webster’s Word Histories,” touted as a companion for “armchair etymologists,” is a departure from the dictionary publisher’s generally sedate product, filled with lively prose and complete with an eye-catching “bikini” entry on the jacket.

“That was probably picked because it would be of some interest,” Mish said dryly, hastily pointing out the selection was an advertising--not editorial--decision.

Scholarly tomes about the origins of words already exist, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary, which exhaustively defines hundreds of thousands of words and gives their sources.

But “Word Histories,” published in September and priced at $14.95, is aimed more at the kinds of people who contact Merriam-Webster regularly, asking where words or phrases come from, Mish said.

“I make no bones about that, this is intended to be a popular book,” he said. “We have not targeted linguists or historians or any particular group of people of advanced educations or highly specialized interests.”

Audrey Duckert, a lexicographer at the University of Massachusetts who has contributed to Merriam-Webster dictionaries and to the last supplement of the Oxford English Dictionary, said there are surprising numbers of non-scholars who are interested in word origins.

“One of my jobs (at Merriam-Webster) was to answer all the ‘Dear Mr. Webster’ letters. I settled more Scrabble arguments than you can shake a stick at,” she said.

“Sometimes they’re intimidated by scholarly things. Scholars are very often put off by cutesy things. If this goes that middle line between being cute and scholarly, I think it would be a good thing,” she said.

Some of the derivations described are classical, such as “academy,” which stems from the abduction of the 12-year-old Helen of Troy. A man named Akademos showed her brothers, Castor and Pollux, where she was hidden. Athens later named a park and gymnasium after him--Akademeia. There, the philosopher Plato set up his school, the prototype prep.

Others put their stamp on less erudite words. “Bunk,” or nonsense, is the unfortunate legacy of a long-winded early 19th-Century congressman, Felix Walker, who represented the district in which Buncombe County, N.C., is located.

“Bimbo,” now used to describe attractive but foolish females, is found as early as 1919 to describe “a fellow who was unimportant or undistinguished,” according to Word Histories. The word is believed to have derived from an Italian term for baby. Use of the word to describe a sexually promiscuous woman did not catch on until the advent of 1930s detective novels peopled by beautiful but dumb blondes.

Some words refuse to be neatly explained, and editors note in the introduction to the book that etymology is not an exact science.

For example, the entry for “bikini,” describes 1946 atomic bomb tests on the atoll of Bikini in the Marshall Islands. “In the summer of 1947, another bombshell hit the beaches of the French Riviera, the bikini,” the entry continues.

Editors confess that they do not know how one led to the other, although they offer the theories that the effect of a bikini-clad woman compares to an atomic blast, or the ground-stripping effect of an atomic blast compares to a bikini. A third theory, that the shape of the atoll looks like a bikinied figure, is dismissed as unlikely even to the “most perfervid imagination.”

By the way, “perfervid,” means extremely or excessively fervent.