One of the pleasures of working in the world of words is the possibility of finding relationships between words that might, at first glance, seem unlikely. The other night a carpenter friend of mine, John Joe Smyth from The Willow Grove, Delgany, was talking about the tools of his trade, and the word auger came up.
There is, would you believe, a connection between auger and that part of the human anatomy called the belly-button or navel. How come? The belly-button is not bored by an obstetrician's auger, after all.
Well, the Old English nafela, navel, is a close relative of Old English nafu, nave. The nave is the hub from which the spokes of a wheel radiate, and through which a hole is bored to fit the axle. (This nave is not the same word as the nave of a church, by the way.)
Now the navel is more or less in the centre of the human abdomen, and in Old English a compound was formed from nafu and gar, a spear, to give a name to the tool used to make the hole in the hub or nave of a wheel. This new word was nafogar.
In Middle English the form navegar came to be spelled nauger, and then in the 15th century, a nauger was incorrectly divided as an auger, the tool my friend Mr Smyth uses to bore holes in wood.
Margaret Hartley from Waterford would like to know something about the history of the word chintz.
This word comes from India, and is, as the world knows, a decoratively printed calico. Its origin is the Hindi chit, which comes from Sanskrit chitra, variegated. The English pronounced the Hindi word as chint, and gave it a plural, chints, which, by Alexander Pope's time, was being written as chintz.
It was a very expensive material in those days, and Pope, in his Epistle to Sir Richard Temple (1733), the first of his Moral Essays, tells of a dying actress who is concerned about the clothes she wants to be waked and buried in: " `Odious! In woolen! 'twould a saint provoke'/ were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke./`No, let a charming Chintz and Brussels lace/ Wrap my cold limbs, and shade my lifeless face . . ."
Let's hope they didn't wrap her in a gunny-sack, the winding sheet of the poor at the time. Gunny, too, is from India: from Hindi and Mahratti goni, from goni, the Sanskrit for a jute bag.