Today's Broadcast

Topic: Terms born in America

While some folks shoot off fireworks tonight, we're shooting off a passel of terms born in America. 

Plenty of words born in America came courtesy of immigrants (think of the Yiddishism bagel, the American Spanish cafeteria, and the Cajun zydeco) to name just a few.  But we can thank American ingenuity for putting a new twist or two on a word borrowed from Native Americans: skunk.

Back in the early 1600s, immigrants to the New World borrowed the Massachusett Indians' name for the member of the weasel family whose perineal glands emit a pungent odor. The Massachusett's name derived from the Algonquian name which meant something like "urinating fox."

By the early 1800s, American English speakers were using skunk to name an obnoxious or disliked person; by the mid- to late-1800s, the new Americans had transformed skunk into a verb meaning "defeat" or "fail to pay (someone)," or "shut out"; "prevent entirely from scoring or succeeding."

Then of course, there's skunk works, born on the American funny pages of the last century. Cartoonist Al Capp created Big Barnsmell's illicit distillery Skonk Works in his comic strip L'il Abner. It didn't take long for skunk works to find a place in the general lexicon with the sense "a usually small, often isolated department or facility that functions with minimal supervision within a company."

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.