英语词源字典 - 在线词源网站

boy [boy 词源字典]: boy: [13] The etymology of boy has long been problematical, but the now most generally accepted view is that it is probably a reduced form of an unrecorded Anglo-Norman *abuie or *embuie ‘fettered’, from the Old French verb embuier ‘fetter’. This came from Vulgar Latin *imboiāre, a compound verb based on Latin boiae ‘leather collar, fetter’, which was adapted from Greek boeiai doraí ‘ox-hides’ (hence ‘oxleather thongs’), from bous ‘ox’ (related to English bovine and cow).

The apparently implausible semantic connection is elucidated by the early meaning of boy in English, which was ‘male servant’; according to this view, a boy was etymologically someone kept in leather fetters, and hence a ‘slave’ or ‘servant’. The current main sense, ‘young male’, developed in the 14th century.
=> cow[boy etymology, boy origin, 英语词源]
fit: fit: English has three distinct words fit, but the history of them all is very problematical. The verb fit ‘make suitable, be the right size, etc’ [16], and the presumably related adjective ‘proper, appropriate’ [14] may come from a Middle English verb fitten ‘marshal troops’, but that only pushes the difficulty one stage further back, for no one knows where fitten came from. (The derivative outfit dates from the 18th century.) Fit ‘seizure, sudden outburst’ [14] may be the same word as Old English fitt ‘conflict’, whose antecedents again are obscure (fitful was formed from it in around 1600, but was not widely used before the 19th century). Fit ‘section of a poem’ [OE] also comes from an Old English fitt, which might conceivably be identical with Old English fitt ‘conflict’; but an alternative possibility is some connection with Old High German fizza ‘skein’ and Old Norse fit ‘hem’.
gravy: gravy: [14] To begin with, the word gravy signified a sort of spiced stock-based sauce served with white meat; it was not until the 16th century that its modern sense ‘meat juices’ or ‘sauce made from them’ emerged. Its origins are problematical. It is generally agreed that its v represents a misreading of an n in the Old French word, grané, from which it was borrowed (modern v was written u in medieval manuscripts, and was often very hard to distinguish from n); but what the source of grané was is not clear.

The favourite candidate is perhaps grain (source of English grain), as if ‘sauce flavoured with grains of spice’, but graine ‘meat’ has also been suggested.
=> grain
kidney: kidney: [14] The origins of kidney are a matter of guesswork rather than certain knowledge. Probably the most widely accepted theory is that the -ey element represents ey, the Middle English word for ‘egg’, in allusion to the shape of the kidneys. The first syllable is more problematical, but one possible source is Old English cwith ‘womb’ or the related Old Norse kvithr ‘belly, womb’, in which case kidney would mean etymologically ‘belly-egg’.
=> egg
loo: loo: [20] Loo presents one of the more celebrated puzzles of English etymology. Not the least of its problematical points is that there is no reliable evidence of its existence before the 1920s, whereas most of its suggested sources have a more dated air than that. Amongst them, the most widely touted is of course gardy loo!, a shout of warning (based on French gardez l’eau ‘beware of the water’) supposedly used when emptying chamber pots from upper-storey windows in the days before modern plumbing; but that is chronologically most unlikely.

Other possibilities are that it is short for Waterloo, which was a trade name for cast-iron lavatory cisterns in the early part of the 20th century (‘O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset’, James Joyce, Ulysses 1922), and that it comes from louvre, from the use of slatted screens for a makeshift lavatory. But perhaps the likeliest explanation is that it derives from French lieux d’aisances, literally ‘places of ease’, hence ‘lavatory’ (perhaps picked up by British servicemen in France during World War I).
problematic (adj.): c. 1600, "doubtful, questionable," from French problematique (15c.), from Late Latin problematicus, from Greek problematikos "pertaining to a problem," from problematos, genitive of problema (see problem). Specific sense in logic, differentiating what is possible from what is necessarily true, is from 1610s. Related: Problematical (1560s); problematically.