Cut and Colour

Have you tried Colourlovers.com yet? It's so much fun, practically addictive. I was making up yet another palette today and I used the word "aftermath", at which point I naturally enough wondered, "What's the 'math' in 'aftermath'?"

I mean, the "after" part is pretty obvious; an aftermath is what results after something has happened, usually something bad. But what's the "math"? It can't be the same as in "mathematics", surely.

Luckily, it isn't. That would be just too much for me to wrap my head around. The "math" in "aftermath" is actually something along the lines of "moweth", believe it or not. The original source is an Indo-European root, "me-", which means "to mow": the German version is "mähen", which Old English adopted as "mawan" and, after a quick change in vowels, "mowen", which also gave English the word "meadow", in case you were wondering.

"Aftermath", then, means what results after a field is mowed down, and also, by way of metaphor, what results after a bunch of people are mowed down, for that matter. (In the case of a field, though, it literally means not the harvest but the new growth that springs up after the mowing.)