INCUBUS: once an obscene spirits

　　This word and its sister succubus have morbid and obscene origins. Incubus is from the Latin incubo,”lie upon,” and in the beginning referred to an evil spirit who would lie with the ladies when they were asleep and for no good purpose. A succubus ,Latin succumbo, “l(fā)ie beneath,” was a female domon who, in turn ,was reputed to have sexual connection with men in their sleep . Both sexes, apparently, were well taken care of .In its later history the word incubus has come to mean a handi-happing burden of some sort,as ”His career was held back by the incubus of poverty.”A succubus,however,never changed and is still a strumpet.

　　INVESTIGATE:looking for footprints

　　When detectives investigate a murder,it is likely today that they will first look for fingerprints.And yet if the crime had been committed on a snowy night they would search for foot prints too.And here we have the sealed-in picture of investigate:Latin in,”in,”and vestigo,”follow a footprint,” from vestigium, “footprint.”This latter,of course,gives us our word vestige, as,”There is not a vestige of truth in the statement.”T hat is,not a trace or a footprint of truth.

　　LUNATIC: moonstruck

　　There are many people today who would feel uncomfortable if they had to sleep with the moon shining in their faces.They probably wouldn’t believe that this act would turn then into lunatics,but the shadow of that superstition still remains in the race .Down through the centuries there has been a widespread notion that madness is related to the moon,and that the violence of madness changes with the phases of the moon.In Roman mythology luna was the moon goddess,and it was her name that gave us lunatic because she was supposed to create this condition.

　　MAIM:knocking out a front tooth

　　An early statute says that you have maimed a man if you knock out his front tooth ,but that he is not maimed if you knock out one of his grinders,because with a front tooth he can bite and tear at the enemy,while with a grinder he can only masticate his food.Another amusing law in 1641 says that “The cutting off of an eare,or nose ,or breaking of the hinder teeth,or such like ,is no maihem.”Now ,of course, the words maim and mayhem apply to any willful mutilation.

　　MAROON:take to the wilds .

　　When pirates of old took a dislike to one of their fellow buccaneers,they would set him ashore,or maroon him,on some farlff island and simply sail away.In the beginning though, maroon was a moun, and maroons were the Negroes who lived in Dutch Guiana and the West Indies.The word is from the French term marron, a short form of the Spanish word cimarron,meaning wild and untamed.Later on maroon changed to mean “one left in the wilds .”

　　MOB:from a Latin phrase

　　The English have often accused us Americans of being lazy with our language.We won’t bother,they say,to call a man a baseball fanatic.We clip this to “a baseball fan.”But if we turn back the pages of history, we discover that the British had this same habit around the beginning of the 18th century.They,too were coining new words by snipping bits off old ones.The essayist, Joseph Addison,was quite haughty about it all. He refers to the practice as:”This Humour of speading no more than we needs must which has so miserably curtailed some of our Words”，and he cites the new vulgarism mob as an example.Before the reign of Charles II folks never said such a slang word as mob. They used the Latin phrase mobile vulgus,”the fickle crowd.”But to Addison’s horror they soon shortened this to mobile Then to the mob which we still have with us.

　　MOUNTEBANK:on a bench

　　The history of mountebank ties in to those barkers who talk you into sideshows at the circus, and to the old-time fakers who stepped up on a soapbox and sold Indian snake oil cures.The derivation of the word proves the point Mounteband comes from the Italian montambanco, a contraction of the phrase monta-in-banco, that reads in translation”mount-on-bench.”In Italian montambanco,a contraction of the phrase monta-in-banco ,that reads in translation “mount-on-bench.”In Italy the montambanco was a quack who customarily perched on a bench to hawk his fraudulent wares,and gathered a crowd around him with his jokes and juggling.