Words that have a longer history then you thought

[Laura Corin]

 

'Squeegee' - I just came across the word in Moby Dick.  I had assumed that it was a modern word, perhaps a trademark.  But no:

 

Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.

 

'Baseball' comes up in Northanger Abbey, as a precursor to the later codified US version:

 

Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books—or at least books of information—for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.

 

 

Any others?

[Tanaqui]

Ditto.

[RegGuheert]

Any others?

'Stuff' - I have always been surprised to find that word used repeatedly in the KJV of the Old Testament of the Bible. (And I see it is also used in Luke.) Firstly, I always somehow imagined that word was modern slang. Secondly, it never seemed like a word that belonged in the Bible at all!

 

My iPad Bible app tells me 'stuff' is used 13 times. See if you can spot the word that does not seem to fit in the following passage:

 

Genesis 31:37

Whereas thou hast searched all my stuff, what hast thou found of all thy household stuff? set it here before my brethren and thy brethren, that they may judge betwixt us both.