Like a lot of people, I enjoy sleeping. Unfortunately, I suck at it, which is a round-about way of saying I don’t get enough of it. It’s not for a lack of trying. See, on a given day, I typically fall asleep on the couch in our living room around 11:30 pm or midnight, often with great ease. Then, sometime between 3:30 and 5:00 am, things get rocky.
Sometimes I just wake up for no reason, sometimes I wake up because my coffee-filled bladder sends my brain an urgent message about visiting the bathroom, and sometimes my dogs, who start thinking about breakfast around 5, wake me. Whatever the cause of this pre-dawn rousing, I eventually make my way to my bedroom, where I attempt re-entry in the Land of Nod. I eventually get there, but it takes some time. All too often, the walk from the couch to the bedroom is enough to get my blood moving, making sleep that much more difficult. So I lay there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for my eyelids to get heavy. And that’s when the noise starts.
I don’t know why, but in my little corner of the world, 5:00 and 6:00 am is prime time for a few idiots who’ve been inspired by the Fast and Furious movie franchise to drive their loudly modified cars through and close-by my neighborhood (and home) at high speeds. I don’t know why—or why anyone would want such a car—but the amount of noise these vehicles make is obscene. Even though the windows of my bedroom are closed, it sounds like these cars are driving within a few feet of my bed. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. Who are these people and what makes them think such behavior is acceptable? Are they upset that they have to be up at that ungodly hour, so they want everyone else to be up too? Whatever the reason, these assholes should have their licenses revoked—and then forced to attend common courtesy summer school classes.
Anyway, enough about these Vin-Diesel wanna-bees. Living through this cacophony day-in and day-out has me thinking about the word noise and its origins.
According to the good people at Merriam Webster, noise has quite a few definitions. Clearly, though, I’m interested in only this one: “sound, especially one that lacks an agreeable quality or is noticeably unpleasant or loud.”
And where does this word come from? Interestingly, the Latin word for nausea, which is … um … nausea. According to our pal Eric Partridge and his Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, the connection between noise and nausea has to do with the timeless sound of “a shipful of passengers groaning and vomiting in bad weather.” No wonder the people driving the awfully loud cars in the early morning hours make me sick.
It's worth pointing out that this connection, spurious though it may seem, is supported by other etymological texts, including the Ayto Dictionary of Word Origins, which can be somewhat contrarian. As it notes of noise:
Unlikely as it may seem, the ancestor of English noise meant 'sickness.' It comes from Latin nausea, (and of course, English nausea). This was used colloquially for the sort of 'hubbub' or 'confusion' which is often coincident with someone being sick (and particularly seasick, which was what nausea originally implied), and Old French took it over, as noise, with roughly these senses. They later developed to "noisy dispute, and modern French noise has retained the 'dispute' element of this, while English noise has gone for the ‘intrusive sound.’
The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories makes a similar ruckus and so does the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. In fact, the latter even considers another etymological option and then abandons it die to lack of evidence.
[Although] the tracing of the Old French to Gallo-Romance is now recorded in most sources, it is difficult to accept the disparity of both sense and form, which makes it tempting to suggest that noise may be related to the obsolete English noisance a variant of nuisance: however, such a relationship is not sustainable if the record of Middle English is accurate, for noisance and its related words do not appear until at least 100 years after noise and in most instances almost 200 years.
Let’s just assume that record is accurate, shall we?
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