Timely etymology: Debby, monopoly, waltz, and breaking

Severe weather. Big judicial rulings. Onomastic mixups. Olympic debuts. There’s a lot going on out there—and, as always, there’s a lot of words in the news that get me asking, “Now, where does that word come from?”

It’s time for a little etymological news roundup. 

Origin of the name Debby

The remnants of Hurricane Debby continue to dump a damaging and deadly amount of water across the southern and eastern US this week. 

Debby is a diminutive variant of Deborah, which comes from the Hebrew word for “bee” (dvorá). Deborah was a powerful prophetess and judge in the Old Testament who spurred the Israelites to victory over oppressive Canaanite overlords. 

The Greek for “bee” yields the name Melissa, name of a nymph credited in some myths with first cultivating honey. The Greek root here, meli, means “honey.”

Short for Melissa is Mel. So, if your significant other is Melissa and you call them Mel as a pet name, it’s like you’re also calling them “honey”—itself a pet name. A fancy word for “pet name” is hypocorism. Wait, weren’t we talking about Debby?

Be safe out there, folks. 

The origin of monopoly

A US judge ruled Google search an illegal monopoly this week. (Why does this feel like writing for a bad late-show monologue?)

The first part, mono-, means and comes from the Greek for “one, single.” The second part, –poly, is from a Greek verb “to sell.” 

(You know, I’ve always sort of lazily—and wrongly—assumed the second portion was from some extended “power” sense of polis, meaning “city” and featuring in such words as metropolitan or Indianapolis. Don’t let assumptions monopolize you!)

The original Greek word, monopolion, meant “right of exclusive sale.” 

Others words featuring -poly are duopoly (when two suppliers dominate a market) and oligopoly, when a few are in control (oligos meaning “small, little” in Greek). And then there’s bibliopole. Not bibliophile, but bibliopole. That’s a fancy term for a “bookseller,” especially of rare books.

Give me that sweet, sweet bibliopoly money, please!

Waltz origin

The VP picked her VP this week: Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Since then, people and pundits have been declaiming many things of Walz, including occasionally inadvertently misrendering his surname as waltz.

A waltz is a triple time dance involving a pair turning rhythmically round and round. If you can believe it, the waltz was considered like the twerk of its day when it spread as a dance craze in Europe starting in the late 1700s.

The word comes from the German verb walzen, “to roll” or “revolve,” which aptly describes the essential action of the dance.

That z in German walzen is pronounced as a voiceless alveolar affricate. Say what now? That’s linguistics for a ts sound, as in cats—or waltz.

Derived from walzen is the German noun die Walz, which means “journeyman years,” which is the tradition, still alive in some places today, when a craftsman would travel around in Europe after completing their apprenticeship. Such a craftsman “be on the Walz.”

So, in confusing Walz with waltz, we’re not entirely off base! Weird. 

Why is it called breaking?

Breaking—the dance style that originated in and along with hip-hop in New York in the 1970s—has made its Olympic debut at the Paris games.

Just as hip-hop is an evolution of jazz, so breaking is an evolution of jazz lingo. In early jazz, a break was a short improvised solo or passage of song. This sense is recorded as early as the 1920s. 

Over time, break came to name an instrumental break in a song—and especially when all the other instruments fell back or off, leaving just the drums. The breaks are called drum breaks. 

One of hip-hop’s distinctive innovations—much of which we can credit to DJ Kool Herc in the Bronx in 1973—was sampling and looping these drum breaks, called breakbeats or B-beats. During such extended breakbeats in the early days of hip-hop, as the story goes, people in the audience started dancing—or breaking—in very dynamic ways. 

Such dancers are called b-boys or b-girls, the b short for break or beat. And most of them would very much appreciate it if you didn’t call the event breakdancing.