Jess Zafarris - curiosity over judgement

Jess is an archeologist of words, digging up forgotten stories that gave birth to words with their original meaning… and she teaches us an important lesson:

Whilst powerful, words are not set in stone and their meaning is ever evolving like the humanity that yields them.

I feel very fortunate to have sat down for a quick chat with Jess Zafarris, author of ONCE UPON A WORD: A WORD-ORIGIN DICTIONARY FOR KIDS. I am forever grateful to her for changing my perception of the word “woman”… explaining it is a case of faulty etymology.
To meet a woman who’d devoting her life to words is already special, even more so when you notice how she use positive and uplifting words to describe situations and things. Jess to me is the embodiment of a woman who thinks for herself, who doesn’t take for granted the words being thrown here and there in our society but goes to the spring of things… the place where original thoughts may be found.

What word would you use to describe yourself?

I think it’s a little bit cliche at this point but I would say curious. It’s the reason why I do all that I do. Perhaps curious and relentless because I want to get to the bottom of pretty much anything that I look into. I am unsatisfied with simply knowing a new interesting word. I need to know why it’s that way, who came up with it, and where it came from. 

Like an archeologist of words, beyond mere etymology.

That’s interesting that you say that because one of my areas of study in undergrad was a blend of literature and anthropology. So I found that those two blended along with my Masters in Journalism to create the ultimate trifecta of research in word origins, especially when literature and books are concerned. 

How did you discover this passion?

There were a number of things. I’ve always been an avid reader, I was reading Tolkien at age 8 and he’s the ultimate philologist and linguistics inspiration. So I was always interested in why the stories were written in the way they were and by whom, because it adds dimension and complexity to their existence. 

I also had a class in undergrad that examined the development of English language and literature and across dialects, so it went from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare and beyond. 

But there was a particular moment that I think gave me the foundation that I needed. I had this French teacher when I was in highschool, who was this absolute tornado of a human, her name was Nanette Quinn. She is sadly passed, but was utterly brilliant, endlessly passionate, and unstoppably interesting. She taught me many unforgettable lessons, some in French, some in English, some just about life. Once we were reading out loud in French class from the book Le Petit Prince, a reading we had done for homework the night before, we came across a word that no one in the class knew the English translation for. And she asked the class, ‘what does it mean?’ And we couldn’t respond. There was this long, agonizing, awkward silence and then she exploded in this epic tirage. She started moving back and forth at the back of the class bellowing in French and English, demanding incredulously how on earth we can do this reading, come across this word and not look it up. We had French vocab books, we had worksheets, we had dictionaries, we had Google translate, do we just skip over words whose definitions we don’t know of when we’re reading books in English too? Did we not look those up either? Like, how can you meet a word you don’t know and choose not to learn what it means?  

So that is my approach when I run into a word I do not know, why would I choose not to know when I could know? 

It’s quite revolutionary in a society that ignores the origins of so many things, not just words. And it must be hard in a world that misuses words on a constant basis…

One of my inspirations these days is Gretchen McCulloch and a number of other linguists. She wrote a book called ‘Because Internet,’ it’s about the logic and grammar of internet slang and why those words mean the things that they do. And I used to be a snotty pedantic twerp but these days I find that I’m more accepting and more interested in the way people choose to use certain words, rather than telling them how.

That’s how it has always been. When Shakespeare verbed nouns and adjectived verbs he wasn’t obeying rules, he was coming up with creative poetry. And that’s kind of what we do on Twitter every day when we make up slang and we abbreviate things and we play it to this cultural moment. 

So you choose curiosity over judgment. It’s inspiring, I think I’ve been unconsciously choosing judgment perhaps out of fear of losing something in this era where everything is fast paced and words are thrown here and there thoughtlessly. 

I think words are always evolving. There’s been a vast acceleration of language evolution since the dawn of the internet simply because people from all over the world are able to communicate and influence the way we speak and write and engage in different ways. But it has always happened as long as there has been written or verbal communication, the way people use words has changed. If you look back at it, the majority of old English articles and pronouns usually had many different meanings. Prepositions, too, like the word “of” have had many different meanings over the years and it still does have a lot of different meanings. The way you speak “of” a language is not the same as being “of” a certain place.

I don’t think that being pedantic is especially productive in a world where the way we use a word may change over night. Sometimes it feels wrong the first time but there’s plenty of instances when we go, ‘that’s clever! We should do that more.’ And that’s how we end up with internet slang.

Any particular examples you can share?

Today many are frustrated with the way people use the word “literally” to mean “figuratively”, but they’ll use it for emphasis. But that usage of the word “literally” is recorded hundreds of years ago to people that have been using it in that same way. And the word “literal” itself isn’t actually literal either unless you’re talking about actual letters because it means “by the letter”. So if we’re talking about letters of the law perhaps, we can say that’s literal but even then it’s kind of figurative because you’re not talking about letters, you’re talking about phrasing. 

So I found about you while I was researching the origins of the word witch, and as I read about witch, I automatically stumbled upon the origins of the word woman. I went into a rabbit hole I didn’t quite understand, so I’d love to hear from you: what’s the origin of the word woman? 

I’m going to tell two stories here and we can start with the word woman. So in old English the word man was “wer” and the word woman was “wif” which is the origin of the word “wife” but it didn’t mean wife back then. The former, wer, is cognit with the latin “were” which appears in the word werewolf - so werewolf literally means manwolf. In old English the word man did exist and it was more commonly used to mean human or humankind but much like today it could also double as a word for male human. It was not specifically gendered thought but “wer” was and “wif” was. Another variation of the same word was “wifman”, literally woman human. That’s when the transition from wif to wifman and, over time through vowel shifts and pronunciation shifts, wifman shifted to become woman. Man became the standard word for a male person while retaining that humankind sense. Husband replaced the word were as a married man, and were vanished except for the world werewolf - which is tragic because I think wer and wif sound kind of cool together. 

Another thing that’s kind of interesting is the term female and male. These two words are not etymologically related, at all. The word female originally comes from the Latin word for a female person “femina”, and the diminutive of the word femina is “ femella” which means young girl or female. Femela entered the English language as female, or really as “femelle” like in French. But in the 14th century the spelling was changed because people thought it was a variation of the word male understandably. It’s not! The word male comes from the latin “masculus” which is completely unrelated to the word femina. And when masculus entered old french, it became “males” (well it had an s in it which added a circumflex and now the circumflex is over the a). When old French carried it over to modern French they dropped the s, so it became the English “male”. Technically these two words have no relation whatsoever, there’s just a faulty etymology influence which is where the perception of a word influences its spelling or meaning in our modern sense. So the word male was laid over the word femella and influenced its spelling but ultimately they have completely different roots. 

Since you study the origins of words, did it change you in the way you speak?

Absolutely. My next book that’s coming out, Word From Hell, includes several chapters on bias, including gendered words, homophobic words, words that are embedded with ableism, and racism. And there are so many words that, while you read them in literature of the past 100 years, you would not necessarily think that they’re embedded with anything nefarious or the way people use them today. But a lot of times they are. 

For example, and this is relatively common knowledge now but 10-15 years ago it wasn’t, the word “hysterical” is rooted in the word womb so to be hysterical essentially means to have the lady crazies. And that was a medical diagnosis in the late 1800, women were diagnosed with hysteria if they were sad or had a weird period or if anything uncomfortable happened to them and the people in their life decided that they were insane, they could be institutionalized for hysteria based pretty much on any judgment whatsoever. There’s actually a medical textbook that includes symptoms of hysteria, there’s like 50 different symptoms going from she was itchy to she was sad. So using the term hysterical, saying hysterical laughter I don’t tend to use that term anymore because it’s very gendered.

How did a medical go from being a medical diagnosis to becoming an adjective describing a type of laughter?

Basically because people were institutionalized for it, a hysterical laughter was the laughter of someone who is mad. Mass hysteria was another thing… first implied to a group of women exhibiting unusual behavior or just being upset about things. Then it was applied more broadly to other people who experience instances that have been termed mass hysteria whether they are or not.

There are plenty of other words. I don’t like to use words such as “lame” anymore, because that was initially a term for someone with a physical disability. I don’t like to use the terms like moron, idiot, because they were actual diagnoses for people with various mental disabilities. 

So I’m much more cautious about the terms that I use. And if someone uses them without understanding the meaning behind them, I’m not gonna be like, ‘You should not say that!’ But when it’s up to me, I choose not to use them. If a person is interested in a teachable moment, then I’ll go, ‘Hey did you know that…’ I find it alienates people to come at them harshly with criticism.

What do you think are the implications of using a medical term in the common language? Even when it doesn’t imply a serious diagnosis (also because I bet most people don’t even know what the actual diagnosis is). I mean, when the medical term of let’s say “idiot” gets out of the institution … does it make everyone “institutionalizable” or does the term lose its power altogether? And will a new medical term need to be invented for that diagnosis? Essentially I wonder, if language becomes fluid and exits the confines for which it was created… How does that reflect in the world?

Typically when words like “idiot” and “moron” are no longer used in medical contexts, it’s because more specific and scientific terms for conditions and disabilities have become the preferred terminology among doctors and researchers. In the instance of these words, it was psychologists of the late 19th and 20th century that began to put more specific and medical-sounding names to mental disabilities and conditions, displacing catch-all terms for people with those disabilities and conditions. 

Do you believe that the way one speaks influences its reality?
I am a believer that thoughts create our reality and that the words influence our energy field. The concept “what you put your attention on grows” is proved by you stressing the fact that you describe yourself as curious rather than judgmental and that obviously has an effect on how people perceive you, and feel perceived by you. So I’d like to know to what extent you believe that words are powerful and need to be used intelligently.

For anyone who’s interested in words, I would advise people to remember that words do have immense power. Their definitions, their colloquial meanings, the way they evolve, where they come from. I think Nanette Quinn’s lesson that you should look up words you’ve never met before and dig deeper is critical. Etymology helps you be more precise and thoughtful with your word choices, and to wield your words for better uses, for creativity and to cultivate knowledge. 

And I think the more curious you are the more power you can choose to apply when writing and when you’re using your words. Using words with intention about their origins does give them more power. It also makes you a little more clever and a little more funny and a little more interesting. There’s art to it! You can tell when an author is using a word cleverly based on its origin and it’s such a magical thing. Understanding pitfalls, where words have been embedded with bias, gives you the power to choose words that will not alienate people more. Or if you’re careful about the words that you choose you can be more inclusive, which is excellent too.

Another element of this that aligns with my upcoming book is…  an earlier part of your question talked about how the way we use language can influence society. I think one interesting example of this is 60 or 70 years ago swear words were a lot less common in the media. There was a great deal of censorship and this is due to a series of censorship laws that were passed in the 60s and 70s and there were things you weren’t allowed to say on TV. Now we say those words often, you find swear words everywhere. The F word is emphatic now, it doesn’t even mean anything, ‘I’m so fucking sad today!’ That doesn’t mean anything compared to its literal meaning. And I think that’s evidence enough of the fact that today the internet is a great equalizer, where people who are in political positions and people who are higher up in businesses are interacting with everyday people all the time. And the everyday people have a good deal of more power now because of the words that they use. You can’t just say anything, you know. And they’re able to express collective power through words that have formerly been termed taboo. 

Is there a precise moment when you decided you were going to do this in your life?

I would say in undergrad, when I started looking at it through a historical lens being able to look up at reliable research. There’s a lot of false theories and myths about word origins around the internet.
The formative moments tended to be probably during my undergrad in my literature degree and then when my Ma in journalism gave me the power to be more discerning with the research I was doing and take advantage of the public domain and the literature we have in our hands at our fingertips, knowing where to look for good information.
A lot of people would open the Oxford dictionary of etymology and see the word was first used in 1906… I ask, ‘well but in what context?’ And then go find that actual instance. It’s more powerful to understand what it looks like in a sentence than to simply read that it first showed up in 1906. I tend to want to understand why the people were using it in that way and what it meant in a letter or a book or in a speech. 

I started documenting this stuff about 10 years ago on a blog named Useless Etymology, just for fun. Eventually a publisher approached me, I started to expand it to social media and another publisher approached me and I was on podcasts … so it became part of my overall journey. Now I have a blog; my tiktok has 83000 followers who listen to me speak about etymology; I wrote a book for kids; got two more books coming over the next couple of years; I  contributed to a board game called The League of the Lexicon, which is a nerdy trivia game; I occasionally collab with internet word nerds like Grammar Girl (Mignon Fogarty); and I’ve spoken at LingComm, which is a linguists communication conference. While it’s not my primary vocation in terms of money, it is where I like to spend my time and my passion.

What’s your day job?
Now, I work at Dentsu Creative, an agency that’s part of a larger network called Dentsu. Advertising is fun, it’s creativity with the money to make it awesome. Although it is for brands and it’s all capitalism, the amount of experimentation and fun that artists and creators and writers can have in advertising - because they have the money to do it - is actually quite cool. The push lately to make that more purpose driven and make the world a better place has made the advertising world better, I think. However, if I had the opportunity to run a publication or a media organisation that was focused solely on etymology, and was as lucrative as my broader journalism career, then I would absolutely pivot to that.

To know more about Jess Zafarris’ work, go here.
To get her book, go here.
And, here you can find her TikTok account focused on etymology.