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today's word: jade

I make jewelry (or, well, I did up until several weeks ago when I suddenly ran out of inspiration), and one of the most recent things I made was a necklace of onyx and Taiwanese jade beads. I found a lovely round jade pendant, deep green with spidery veins of black, and I just had to build something around it.

Although the stone is mostly associated with Asia, especially China and Japan, the word jade is derived from Latin. Jade stones were thought to have healing properties, particularly for afflictions of the kidneys. The Latin word ilia -- referring to the sides of the lower torso, or the flanks -- became the Vulgar Latin iliata, which then became ijada in Spanish some time in the 16th century.

The word "jade" actually covers stones from two different but similar-looking minerals -- jadeite and nephrite (also meaning "kidney," from the Greek nephrós). We often use "jade" to describe a particular shade of dark green, but jade stones can range from yellow and brown tones to purple or black. It's the presence of other minerals that lends the color -- pure jade itself is white.

Jaded, our word for those world-weary and cynical folk, has nothing to do with stones or kidneys. Or kidney stones. A "jade" in 14th-Century England was a worn-out horse, possibly derived from the Old Norse jalda ("mare"). The adjective form came to mean "tired" or "sated" in the 16th Century, while the noun -- after a brief second wind as a metaphor for a slatternly woman -- died out.

Comments:

And I'm thinking we get ileum, a part of the gut, from the Latin *ilea*? My, this is fun.

-- elavil, 01/08/2003

 

That's absolutely correct! Ilya, Elia and Illeana, however, are unrelated.

-- amyc, 01/08/2003

 

Also Elavil, yes?

-- elavil, 01/08/2003

 

Indeed.

-- amyc, 01/08/2003

 

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