Nidus Latin ‘nest’ and Derivative Words in English
Nidus is used primarily in the medical sciences, where its chief meaning is: place where a disease process begins, breeding ground for a bacterial outbreak, focus or nest of an infection, the natural reservoir for a pathogen. A nidus can name the centre of a bladder stone or the material around which other lithic accretions (stones) form.
As with many Latin words used in science, there are two plurals. The Latin/British nidi and the clumsy American niduses — which always sounds to me like a person chomping a Three-Pounder Bust-a-Gut-Perforate-Your-Colon Burger while trying to say the word sinus. Both the sound of the word and the act are utter-ly revolting.
Etymology
The classical Latin nīdus ‘nest’ is cognate with Dutch nest, German Nest and Swedish näste.Nidus might be cognate with Slavonic words for ‘nest’ like Russian гнездо gnezdo, Old Church Slavonic gnězdo, Polish gniazdo and Czech hnízdo. The initial Slavonic g/h is however somewhat tricky to account for.
What is certain is that nidus stems from an Indo-European compound noun form whose literal import is ‘place for sitting down,’ seen best in its Sanskrit etymon nida ‘resting-place’ = Sanskrit ni- prefix indicating downward motion + *sad/*sed/*set widespread Indo-European stem meaning ‘sit.’ Nisad in Sanskrit means ‘to nest.’
In formal anatomical nomenclature, nidus avis cerebelli names a groove in the brain, in the cerebellum between the posterior velum and uvula. Zoology uses nidus in its pure Latin meaning of ‘nest.’
Other Words from Nidus
Niche
One currently popular words from nidus in English is a borrowing from French, niche, a small recess in a wall to hold a statue or decorative vase.
Exemplary sentence: The niche in the wall held a large marble bust of George W. Bush. The niche was located in the bedroom of George W. Bush.
To find one’s niche in life is to discover one’s suitable position or calling.
A niche player is a business specialist, who may locate or create a niche market for a product.
A niche can be one’s special place, a lair, an apposite refuge. My niche is my workroom where my books and computer nestle.
Etymology of Niche
Niche word was in Middle French by 1395 CE and was used in English early in the seventeenth century. French may have borrowed niche from its Italian form nicho. The etymon appears to be Latin nidus, by way of a verb form like nidificare ‘to make a nest,’ a form that underwent internal elision and reduction in the Romance languages and dwindled into verb forms like nichier, *nicare or *nichiar.
Pilonidal Cyst
 This is a medical adjective denoting a cyst full of hair or thickened secretions usually found at the top of the sulcus of a person’s buttocks. When chronic inflammation occurs, pilonidal cysts are quite painful.
“During the Second World War, Allied troops were invalided out with Jeep Driver's Bottom—otherwise known as a pilonidal sinus, a painful abscess that forms in the cleft between the upper buttocks.” The World War Two American army slang was peppier. Yanks termed the malady Screamin’ Jeep Ass.
Under glass, that is, microscopically these cysts resemble little bird's nests filled with hair. They occur most frequently at the midline of the back just above the tailbone, aka ass bone. To the naked eye, a simple pilonidal cyst may look like a hairy dimple. This hair in an enclosing structure is also seen in pilonidal sinus, often in the armpit or navel, where a hair has lodged in a fold of skin.
Pilonidal < classical Latin pilus ‘hair’ + Latin nidus ‘nest’
Cyst < medieval Latin cistis > Greek κύστις kystis ‘sac, bladder’
In medicine, a pathological cyst is an abnormal sac or pouch, with a wall lined with epithelial cells, and usually distended by liquid or semi-solid material.
Other Tailbone Afflictions:
Rider’s Butt
This Alberta ranch phrase, also called rider’s bum, is coccygeal tendonitis. Your coccyx (common pronunciation: COCK-sicks) is your tailbone, your ass bone, the last little triangular wedge of a vertebra at the end of your spinal column, a tiny bone formed from four or five even smaller rudimentary vertebrae.
The tailbone can get bumped and bruised riding a horse or sitting for too long during a motorboat ride, hence one of its other everyday names: motorboat bum.
Etymology of the Coccyx Bone
In languages all over the world, including English and Greek, humans name some animals by their characteristic sounds. In English, coot is such a bird name, imitating that bird’s cry as heard by an early speaker of the language. In Old English cu was the echoic word for cow. It’s reasonably certain that cu (coo) was an early Teutonic version of moo! To the ancient Greeks the sound made by the cuckoo bird was kokkuks! Not too far from the English word cuckoo. The Greek word naming that bird for its characteristic call found its way into Latin as coccyx and the Latin word was adopted into English medical terminology. Early Roman anatomists thought the little tailbone at the end of the human spine looked like a cuckoo’s bill, a teeny triangle. That’s how the tailbone received its medical name, coccyx.
For more info, read my column: Rider’s Butt & Other Horse Terms by clicking the link.
http://www.billcasselman.com/unpublished_works/horsewords_coccyx.htm
It’s a Pheasant, Peasant!
One of the nouns of assembly for the pheasant is a nye. One Brit acquainted with the proper language of field sports has written: “To speak of a flock of pheasants is a grievous sin against culture—it is a nye of pheasants.” Nye squawked early in English, having arrived in M.O.E. (Merry Old England) with the Norman Conquest of 1066 CE. It began as Anglo-Norman ny ‘a brood of pheasants,’ twin to the Middle French ni, both truncated forms of French nid ‘nest,’ itself descended from Latin nidus.
Nide
A nide is the nest of a goose, from the same Latin word nidus. Historically it was sparingly used as a synonym for nye.
Eyas
This is the trickiest derivative of nidus to spot because it is an error-altered form of nyas, now obsolete. A nyas was a young hawk taken from the nest to train. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1616 CE), Act 2, Scene 2, line 340 “An ayrie of Children, little Yases (eyas), that crye out on the top of question.” Yases are eyas ‘nestlings.’
The difficulty with where exactly the letter /n/ fits happened to several other words in older English. For example, the adder snake, the common viper of Europe, began as a naddre, but people hearing the phrase for the first time thought it ought to be an adder. Yet its cognate in Old High German is natara ‘water snake’ and Old Norse nathr ‘viper.’
The word with /n/ correctly used as the first letter of the word entered England as an Anglo-Norman technical term in falconry, a young bird removed from the nest to train. It had forms like niais, niés, nieys, nioys, all descended from Latin nidus ‘nest.’ When English speakers unused to French first said phrases like an niais, they were corrected by ignoramuses who stated that it ought to be an *iais or an eyas. What a nest of ninnies!
Nidifugous
This technical adjective in ornithology is said of a young bird born ready to leave its nest quickly. Nidifugous = nidus ‘nest’ + Latin noun fuga ‘flight, escape, retreat.
Rupert was an enterprising youth and early proved nidifugous, driving at the age of ten his father’s Bentley all the way to Windsor for lunch.
The Silly Nidus Words
Nidulate
I have left my preferred silly nidus words to the end. To nidulate is to build a nest. It is rare and obsolete and has, of course, a Latin diminituive form as its root, nidulus ‘little nest.’ Alberta-bound youth: “I shall go west, marry a good woman and nidulate in the Rockies.”
Nidifice
Another word, rare to the point of silliness, is among my choicest verbal gems. It is a word for a bird’s nest, nidifice, formed on the analogy of edifice. It belongs in all bad bird poems. For example, here’s a wee confection I just whipped up out behind the barn:
O Thrush, I rush ahush to thy dear nidifice
To see you slew your father, You Oedipus!
Nidifice descends from the Latin verb nidificare ‘to build a nest.’
Nidificate
And that brings us to nidificate. And thereby hangs a modest personal tale. When I was young, I studied Quebec fiction briefly. On the course was a wonderful second novel by the Quebec writer Gabrielle Roy with the melodious, mellifuous title La Petite poule d'eau (1950), one of Canada’s best pastoral stories set in an idyllic Northern Manitoba where the author had been for one summer a school mistress. When Roy’s sweet novel was translated into English, it received the stupid, ugly, clunker title of Where Nests the Water Hen. An atrocity of clumsy English with its pompous verb out of place in primary position, that title bore no relationship to the tone and content of the novel. So those of us who possessed an ear decided we would try to compete with the English-deaf nincompoop who had supplied that title. Could we humble students out-awkward such a shoddy titleist? My contribution was Where Nidificates The Sooty Coot. I still like it, as parody and comeuppance.
Copyright 2012 © William Gordon Casselman
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