Hebrew: "ben," son; "jamin," right: son of (my) right
IP, can you expanding on the meaning? I don't quite understand.
Also, I couldn't see a theme for this week's words. Is it there and I just missed it?
Jacob's youngest son, I think. Jacob named him "Benjamin," "son of my right," meaning nearest to his heart, or some such. He was carrying a Franklin note when he went down to Egypt.
Benjamin is my name. I have also been told it means "son of my right hand" which is, when you think about it, quite an ambivalent etymology. It good mean "right-hand son" or "son of my red right hand", if you see what I mean.
'twas for that reason I omitted the 'hand' part. Probably, though, it was the right hand they put under their thigh to make all those covenants with God, back then. Or so I imagine or remember. So it's really not a bad thing at all, if you can get past the titters.
my son is Benjamin-and someone told me that son of the right hand was an idiom for "favorite" (something similar to a employee who is helpful and becomes a boss's 'right hand man'-
I suspect Allyn (welcome Aboard, by the way) wants to know why this flower is called Stinking Benjamin rather than the specific Hebrew etymology of Benjamin. Was the flower named after a particular Benjamin or what?
The "stinking" part is quickly apparent from the several websites which refer to this trillium's odour as akin to carion. The "Benjamin" part is a more interesting mystery.
Hebrew yamin (ymyn) 'the right hand, right side, right; the South'; relatd to Syr.Aram. yamin, yamina', Ugar. ymn, Arabic yami:n, yaman (= right hand, right side, south), Ethiop. yama:n (= right hand), Akkad. immu, imittu (= right hand, right side). Klein's CEDHL. It is interesting that the idea of the South being on the right, due, no doubt, to one's facing East, also obtains in Sanskrit: daksina (cf. Latin dexter) 'right hand, South'.
>> due, no doubt, to one's facing East <<
Interesting. East as origin, presumably?
Interesting. East as origin, presumably?
Heliotrope? Solar worship? Origo 'origin' and orior 'to rise' are related ...
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Benjamin is my name.
Welcome, HL. Just curious - your profile gives your name as Sebastian; is Benjamin a middle name, then?
>>Jacob's youngest son...
That explains the use in Québec. Benjamin is commonly used to mean the youngest son in the family, "Mon frère Robert est le benjamin* de la famille." (My brother Robert is the youngest son in the family.)
*note that it is not capitalized.
Did you-all see this in AWADmail Issue 182?
From: Vivian
Subject: benjamins
As one of the recording engineers who first mixed the popular Puff Daddy hit record, entitled "All About The Benjamins", I can't help feeling a bit of a combination of disappointment and relief that this slang expression for a hundred-dollar bill has now formally been incorporated into the lexicon of our twenty-first century vernacular.
Relief, because, despite hundreds of playbacks in working on the original piece, it took my sixteen-year-old son's exasperated explanation to illuminate me to its meaning, and disappointment because it seems a poor repository for the memory of perhaps the most brilliant of our American
forefathers. Nonetheless, I am curious if there are any literary references to the word prior to the release of the pop song, or if P Diddy is to be remembered for all time as a modern contributor to our language.
The OED lists him (as S. Combs) as the first citation (1994) for the word in the line "My pockets swell to the rim with Benjamins."
-Anu Garg
And for those of us who think our jobs are bad:
From: Kerala
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--benjamin
I started earning a living in the India Security Press in the early 60s as a supervisor which was also part of the currency note printing press in India at the time. We used to work in bays, so to say that any worker leaving the bay had to be frisked by a watchman at the door, and workers returning home or breaking for lunch literally were required to strip themselves in front of the security staff who carried out the search with bare hands. Bales of special white paper used to get printed in printing presses six days in a week of two ten-hour shifts in a dingy prisonlike highwalled building. Fresh air was at a premium and once inside you could breathe fresh air only when
out of the main Gate.
We still carry the picture of Mahatma Gandhi in currency notes and no one calls the Indian currency notes 'Gandhis'.
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Did you-all see this in AWADmail Issue 182?
We still carry the picture of Mahatma Gandhi in currency notes and no one calls the Indian currency notes 'Gandhis'.
Of course, given that mr didymous called them "benjamins" not "franklins", the Indian equivalent would have been "Mohandases", not "Gandhis"
>>Mohandeses
That's a lotta scratch to pouche; I'd stick to the short stack, "Ghandis." But what do I know, I have not been a step of Broadway since repeal.