‘On Language’ 12/28: words of the year
`Podcast’ is lexicon’s Word of the Year
‘On Language‘
Chicago Tribune
December 28, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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The “pod” in “iPod” suggests Apple’s device is small and compact but chock full of good contents, like a pea pod. The word “pod” began as “cod” in Old English, meaning “the husk or outer covering of any fruit or seed.” The “pod” spelling isn’t recorded until 1688, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.(The “pod” that comes from the Greek word for “foot,” as in “podiatrist” and “tripod,” is unrelated.)
Dictionaries list the origin of the word “pod” as obscure or unknown.
Etymologists say the letter “P” gradually replaced the word “C” in “cod,” but they aren’t sure why.
Anatoly Liberman, author of “Word Origins and How We Know Them” (Oxford University Press, 312 pages, $25), says people may have favored the “P” in “pod” because it matched the sound of “pea,” which is often paired with “pod.”
More subtly, Liberman says, “pod” might have emerged because it sounded similar to words such as “pad,” “pudge,” “pot” and “pudding.”
“Numerous English words referring to swollen objects, protrusion, and the like have the structure P + Vowel + Consonant,” Liberman writes by e-mail. This sound structure, he says, may have “suggested fatness to the speakers of Germanic [languages].”
If Liberman is right, and “pod” did emerge in English because it sounded similar to words meaning “fat” or “full,” then it would be ironic that Apple markets products in the iPod line that are distinctive for their thinness.
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