starting off on the right foot

A friend posted on this new Year's Eve: "Just before midnight, lift your left foot off the ground so that your start the new year on the right foot." Mildly humorous, but it got me thinking about why we would even say such an idiom. 

The origin is uncertain. I found two possibilities.  One is simply that starting a journey correctly is important. Many cultures consider the right foot and right hand as more auspicious than the left. The opposite idion is "get off on the wrong foot." 

Goofy with his right foot forward

In my youthful surfing days, I was a "Goofy foot surfer" because I would place my right foot forward on the surfboard, with the left foot at the back: This stance is the opposite of regular foot surfing, where the surfer places their left foot forward. Being right'handed and right-foot dominant (as when I kick) when I ran sprints, I would put my stronger right leg in back to push off the starting blocks.

Another origin for the idiom is from dance. Starting a dance routine on the right foot is crucial to a smooth performance. Of course, in that usage "right" could also mean "correct."

Toponyms and a Condom

Earlier I mentioned some offensive place names (almost always unintentional). Less vulgar but still not great for a place's public image is something like the French town of Condom. No matter what the origin of the name might be, English speakers will associate it with those birth control items.

Condom is an example of a toponym. Condom comes from the Gaulish words condate and magos combined into Condatomagos, which means "market or field, of the confluence".Condatómagos evolved into Condatóm and then into Conddóm. Condom was first recorded in Latin in the 10th century as Condomus or Condomium. It is where the river Gèle flows into the river Baïse.[

Although the French word for the contraceptive condom is préservatif, in 1995 the town's mayor, taking advantage of the incidental relationship between the town's name and the English word, opened a museum of contraceptives that operated until 2005.

Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of toponyms which are proper names of places,  including their origins, meanings, usage, and types.

Part 2 of this vocabulary lesson is to say that toponymy is a branch of onomastics, the study of proper names of all kinds.

The term toponymy comes from Ancient Greek tópos, 'place', and onoma, 'name'. The Oxford English Dictionary records toponymy (meaning "place name") first appearing in English in 1876. Since then, toponym has come to replace the term place-name in professional discourse among geographers.

Places With Offensive Names

Some places have names that are offensive or humorous in other languages.

A few examples are Rottenegg or Fucking (renamed to Fugging in 2021) in Austria, or Fjuckby in Sweden, since those names are easily associated with the expletive "fuck."

The town of Fucking is benign in German, but in English it's vulgar. Its earliest recorded use in England is within the 14th-century Bristol field name, Fucking Grove, although it is unclear whether the word was considered obscene at that time. 

December in Japan

 

Like many countries, Japan uses a 12-month calendar. The names used are very simple. January is literally "Month one" 一月, February is "Month two" 二月, and so on. However, before the Meiji Restoration (mid-1800s), an older 12-month system was common. These months’ names referenced the weather and the seasons, similar to how we name the Full Moons.

December is 師走. The kanji (I think that is the correct term for an ideogram) 師 can refer to a teacher, or a mentor, often in a religious sense. In this context, it means a monk. The second ideogram is 走 which means "running." So, this December literally means "monks running."   

But why? 

In December, monks are very busy preparing for the New Year's festival, so this last month of the year is "the month of running monks."

Chrismukkah

By Jonah Green - Flickr: Hanukkah bush, CC BY 2.0, Link

Chrismukkah is a pop-culture portmanteau neologism referring to the merging of the holidays of Christianity's Christmas and Judaism's Hanukkah. 

The term was popularized beginning in December 2003 by the TV drama The O.C., in which the character Seth Cohen creates the holiday to signify his upbringing in an interfaith household with a Jewish father and Protestant mother. 

The holiday can also be adopted by all-Jewish households that celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday.

The term first arose in the German-speaking countries among middle-class Jews in the 19th century. 

After World War II, Chrismukkah became particularly popular in the United States but is also celebrated in other countries.

For a deeper and more personal take on this, see my post today on Weekends in Paradelle.